


Wish You Were Here!

by bobtailsquid



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Comedy, DIY island survival, DSOD compliant, Drama, Eventual Smut, M/M, Post-Dark Side Of Dimensions, Prideshipping, Romance, prideshipping - freeform, the existential pleasures of the ocean, tropical island fic, variations on ancient egyptian mythology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:33:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22597876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobtailsquid/pseuds/bobtailsquid
Summary: After Kaiba's dimension ship crash-lands in the ocean, Atem and Kaiba find themselves stranded on a remote tropical island.Chapter 3:Seto's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day at the beach, OR: that's the thing about anxiety - the way it just eats you up.
Relationships: Atem/Kaiba Seto, Kaiba Seto/Yami Yuugi | Atem
Comments: 79
Kudos: 139





	1. Messenger of Osiris

**Author's Note:**

> i'm writing this because i love romance and the ocean. on sunday, god willing, i'll spend all day in a wetsuit.
> 
> content warnings: graphic description of vomit (post-CPR regurgitation) and a lot of death mentions, including descriptions of dead fish.

His first death was deliberate. His second death was... clear-eyed, at least.

This was his third. After all that? Atem's third death was a tight fist in his chest, squeezing harder and harder. He kicked and thrashed, reaching for the bright, shifting sky far above him, moving far too slow, falling far too fast. The gold on his forearms and ankles dragged him into the black throat of the sea, his lungs filling with saltwater. Somewhere below him, some sleek, dark thing was sinking, breaking apart with concussive thuds. He’d done this before – twice, an expert by now – but like this? After all that? This was the worst. A pointless, stupid accident. He couldn’t breathe. His lungs twisted inside out, with knifing agony. Third time’s the charm – 

He sank. His outstretched hand was a silhouette framed in light, all the edges turning soft, fading… 

A shadow crossed the light. Someone grabbed his wrist with a bone-breaking grip, pulling him up. Thank the gods.

He closed his eyes. No, it was Kaiba. That –

* * *

" – _bastard!_ " Kaiba roared, kneeling over him on the sand, hands laced firmly on Atem's chest, pumping with rib-cracking force. "Are you listening to me?! Atem! Wake up!”

He leaned over him, keeping his head tilted back with one hand and pinching his nose shut with the other, locking his mouth over Atem’s. One breath, eased in, deliberately slow. His lips were wet and cold. Atem was vaguely aware of it, both inside and outside of himself. He felt himself slipping off his body like an over-loose shirt. A second breath, to no effect. What had changed, since he left? Kaiba was still a storm in a bottle, bashing himself in fury against the glass. And Yuugi? A smile and a nod that, for all its wistful touch of blessing, told him nothing. Somewhere Mahaad was warning Atem, a voice issuing from a formless darkness, as sweet and smooth as honey _if you go_

Kaiba slammed his hands back onto his chest, resuming compressions, the power and precision of his rhythm barely escaping the desperation in every word.

“Don't you dare fucking _die_ on me! _Again!_ ” he shouted, and passed another two breaths into his lungs. He braced his hands on Atem’s chest for the third time, panting, huffing seawater off his lips… 

...and keeled over, touching his forehead to Atem’s. 

Atem was very still. 

Somewhere distant, racing around the narrowing rim of darkness, was the sound of waves, rolling in gentle whispers onto a shore. Every second, a little closer.

“Don’t,” Kaiba breathed. “Don’t leave me. I can’t do this again. Please, I can’t...”

His voice broke, a terrifying sound. Atem had never heard Kaiba falter like that. Not in his second life, or the one before it. 

It lasted only a moment.

Kaiba rose up, finishing his thought with another punishing shove into Atem’s chest. Again. Again. Again. _Wake!_ Again. _Up!_ Again. Agai – 

And the first breath Atem took of his new life was a wet, painful blurt, a mix of vomit and saltwater kicked out of his chest, splashing across his chin. He opened his eyes to a vast blue sky, as broad and air-filled as a sail, and Kaiba looming over him, dripping wet, his expression contorted with anger and fear. 

He barely had time to draw a second breath before Kaiba grabbed him under the shoulder and hip and rolled him bodily onto his side, facing away. With a horrid lurch, his insides convulsed. The remains of his last lunch in Aaru surged burning out of his throat, spilling onto the pillowy white sands. He coughed again, adding another mouthful onto the disgusting, yellow-brown glut of figs and bread and beer.

“Get it all out,” Kaiba ordered, still gripping his shoulder.

Atem lifted a weak hand, waving him away, panting for breath. His insides kicked again, but nothing came out. Warm, clean air was flowing into his lungs, his chest expanding like a bellows. No one remembered the moment they were born, pulled into the world slick with body fluids, flailing and screaming like they knew what petty miseries awaited them. Maybe it was better that kind of undignified arrival went unremembered. But he had a chance to remember _this_ birth – to feel himself, for the first time in thousands of years, _alive_ , even with vomit dripping from his chin and a deep soreness in his chest. His own brown hand half-buried in white sand, his linen shendyt clinging wet and crawling to his waist and thighs. 

He took a breath. His heart galloped with the thrill, struck by stunning, wild euphoria. He took another.

"Stay here. And stay on your side. I'll be right back," Kaiba said, squeezing his shoulder in light reassurance. For who? He staggered to his feet behind Atem and left, footsteps almost soundless on the sand. 

Atem lifted his head, following the shore's gentle slope to the point where it slid, almost seamless, into the ankle-high waves of the clearest, calmest turquoise water he'd seen in his life. Any life.

He heaved another breath, almost a sigh, trying to fit the fragments of the last hour back together. Sitting in Kaiba's odd little ship, wedged in behind him. An explosion of glittering, golden light. The vast blue-white curve of the world, glowing with saturated color against the blackness of space. Behind it, a silence of infinite depth. Kaiba fighting his controls with preternatural sang-froid as the ocean rose to greet them, with scorching speed, alarms blaring like war trumpets in their ears… and then?

Without warning, Kaiba swooped him up, one arm under his knees, the other around his shoulders. Atem curled comfortably into his broad chest, head lolling onto his shoulder. _Gods_ , he was strong. He could feel the muscle through his soaking wet black shirt, and Kaiba's heart, full of thunder.

"Kaiba," he said. 

"What," Kaiba said, walking up the beach. His eyes were riveted forward, on the line of lush tropical trees whose broad leaves slumped like awnings over the top of the shallow slope. 

"What happened?"

In the shade of a large tree, Kaiba lowered him onto his white coat, which he'd laid out on the ground, atop the dry, crunchy mix of dead foliage and sand. He helped Atem sit up, his back leaning against the tree trunk, and knelt beside him, hands flying over him in light, purposeful touches. Loosening his belt, relieving the pressure on his waist, and wrapping his hands around his chest, gingerly testing for broken ribs. Two fingers on his neck, checking his pulse. Tipping his chin up to hold his gaze, narrow and studious. 

Atem almost wanted to swat him away. This hovering was completely unnecessary; he was completely alive. But Kaiba's face was tight with anxiety. 

"Something went wrong with the dimension ship on re-entry," he said, thumbing Atem's chin clean and scraping it off into the sand. "It was already damaged by the first crash-landing into the Netherworld. The added strain of a second dimension crossing may have threatened its structural integrity."

"'May have?'" Atem said, raising an eyebrow. 

" _May have,"_ Kaiba growled. "I won't actually know what happened unless I…"

He looked sideways at the ocean, sprawling endless and endless and endless, into the horizon. Somewhere below the serene blue sea were the sputtering, sparking remains of his dimension ship.

"... _fuck,"_ he spat, under his breath. "Whatever! It started breaking apart! I ejected us at the last possible moment, we fell into the water, you sank like a rock. Why didn't you tell me you can't swim?"

"You never asked, and I _can_ swim," Atem said testily, "if I'm not forcibly ejected from a rocket ship, at speed and without warning."

" _Dimension_ ship. It doesn’t use rocket fuel," Kaiba muttered. "Fine! I grant the ejection. But you're also wearing your body weight in gold. You can't blame me for your literally fatal bad taste."

He raked Atem from head to toe, dismissing his clothing with a toss of his hand. Atem looked himself over: one slipper, his shendyt, his belt, gold anklets, gold cuffs, a mostly gold beaded wesekh collar. No cape. He patted his damp hair. No headdress. No Puzzle. At the bottom of the ocean, somewhere. There would be no retreating from this life. 

Kaiba sat back with a heavy huff, forearms resting on his knees, his damp hair still clinging to his face. He ran a hand backwards through his hair, setting it at a rakish angle, and frowned, lapsing into a thousand-mile stare. The blue in his eyes put the sea to shame, bright and vast and unfathomed. 

“Maybe I just wanted to return in style,” Atem said, smiling. 

Kaiba’s only response was a half-amused _hm!_ , still staring at the ocean, face dotted with drops of water. He was wearing that elaborate blue-on-black get-up, almost cyborgian in its sleekness, the digital woven seamlessly into the physical. Somewhere between Aaru and the beach, he’d lost that nifty little headset. No card necklace. Atem didn't remember seeing it on Kaiba's neck at all. The buckles and bracers had survived, although his arm looked oddly light, stripped of his new duel disk.

He seemed bizarrely out of place, no skin showing save his face and hands, stone-faced. Uninterested in the shimmering beauty of the shore and the sea. His mind was elsewhere.

“Best-case scenario,” he announced, after a moment. “KaibaCorp got a signal lock on the dimension ship before it broke apart, and the locator beacon is active. No matter where we are, it would take about… four days max for them to get to us." 

He fell silent again, thinking, his face dappled with sunlight. A light breeze rustled through the foliage overhead. 

“So we’d have nothing to worry about,” Atem said. “Nothing except a little sunburn.”

“Correct," Kaiba said, and offered nothing else.

“...Worst-case scenario?” Atem prompted, after Kaiba’s silence had dragged on a little too long, his expression only growing hard and grim. 

“We’re not on Earth, but in a different dimension.”

“ _What?_ ” Atem said blankly, and looked out over the water. No dimension ship. No chance of repairing it. And if they were in a different dimension… Horror rolled through him, with a sick lurch of finality.

He turned back to Kaiba, with rising panic. “But it looked like Earth! I saw it when we were falling!”

“It _looked like_ an oceanic planet,” Kaiba said tersely. “But until we know this _is_ Earth, we could be anywhere. At last count, the inter-dimensional research team had identified at least six hundred unique dimensions. To say nothing of dimension _crossing_ , which is – an inexact science."

He shot Atem an ice-cold look, braced with bristling, nervous anger. 

"I knew the risks when I chose to come find you," he said, "and you knew them when you chose to come with me.”

It was a look that dared Atem to challenge the truth of that, to accuse him of error, of the only unforgivable sin, _failure_ ; to regret taking his hand, extended over the red sands of Aaru, and climbing into the dimension ship with him.

But Atem took none of those dares. If they really were stranded, in a world outside their world, alone together… He took a deep breath, gathering all of his churning panic to a bottleneck in his throat, and released it, with a long, low sigh. He knew very little of what happened before Kaiba showed up in his palace, or the full extent of what he’d done to get there. Most of what he knew was this: Kaiba had not abandoned him. He’d never abandon Kaiba. _don’t lea –_

“So. If that’s the case,” Kaiba said, and ran his tongue over the edge of his teeth, grimacing, hating the taste of his next question. “Do you still have your... powers?”

“You mean my magic?"

"Yes. That," Kaiba conceded, grudgingly.

"I don’t know,” Atem said, and lifted his head, looking out and up, towards the cloudless sky, where light was pouring out of the blinding white hole in the center. “I’ll… have to ask.”

He rose unsteadily to his feet, one hand hovering over Kaiba’s shoulder for balance.

“You _what?_ Ask _who?_ ” Kaiba said, incredulous. Atem ignored him, stumbling out of the shade and into the sunlight. He trotted down the slope several meters away from Kaiba, pausing only to kick his foot back, tuck a finger into the back of his slipper, and tug it off, throwing it aside onto the sand. He would greet his god with _some_ dignity, at least; not like some debauched prince, limping home at dawn, after a night of beer and song with the soldiers.

The Creator of Life, who’d birthed humans from tears of joy, was already halfway across the sky, in His cosmic barque, every dip of the oars churning stars in slow, unfurling spirals. Atem lifted his head to the Sun, warmth cupping his face like a mother’s pair of hands. 

« LITTLE KING, » Ra-Amun said. « EMERGING FROM THE CHAOS-WATERS, LIKE ME. SHOULD I CALL YOU BROTHER NOW? »

Atem laughed. A divine joke. Ra-Amun had no equals. He was the Before and the After, with every soul falling in between.

« O Lord Sun » Atem said. « Am I still a god? »

« ASK YOUR FATHER, » Ra-Amun replied.

Atem went still, a silent chill rising up his spine. Despite the hot tropical air, the humidity like damp tongues on his skin, he gave a cold little shudder, his body tightening itself against the approach of an oncoming force.

There was something in the water, beyond the gentle shallows: the indistinct shifting of a tremendous dark mass, rising out of the unlit depths. A terrible power was gathering itself, calling him back into the water with a voice impossible to disobey, a command that closed around his will to resist like a fist around his throat. Many had tried. None had ever succeeded... well, maybe one. 

But death and fear, Atem knew, were merely waves. More than once he’d gone headfirst through their walloping forces and surfaced on the other side, changed but unchanged. This was no different. Out of respect for Kaiba’s earlier efforts, and in begrudging concession, he took off his cuffs, anklets, and earrings, dropping them on the sand; then the wesekh, reaching behind his neck to untie it. It glittered on the sand, every tiny jeweled bead winking with color.

The dark mass was on the edge of the shallows now, within reach of a swim. He waded into the warm, glass-clear water, flattening the velvet-soft ripples of the sand with his bare feet. Tiny fish flashed around his calves, darts of silver, like sunlight made solid and lively. The pleats of his shendyt loosened in the current, fanning open, curling and uncurling around his thighs with every step like elegant white fins.

"Atem!" came the shout. 

He turned, waist-deep, to see Kaiba splashing after him, barefoot, black pants cuffed to his knees. 

"What the hell are you doing?! I swear to God, if you drown _again_ – "

 _"Be careful what you say,"_ Atem snapped, with sudden, unnerving presentiment. "They're here, watching us. Listening."

"Who?" Kaiba said, frowning as he swung his head around, his eyes darting up and down the length of the shoreline.

"My gods." 

Kaiba froze, swaying slightly as the waves buffeted his hips, staring at Atem with blank eyes, absent all comprehension. 

"Wh - " he started, a clipped little sound. The rest of the thought collapsed in his half-open mouth. Atem stared back, unblinking, preparing for his inevitable mockery like the Nile prepared for a fisherman's cursing hock of spit: with supreme disinterest. A thing of absolutely no power.

But then Kaiba turned, slow, so slow, to face the throbbing dark shape waiting in the waters. The emptiness of his expression vanished under a flow of understanding. Not just that, but recognition, his eyes narrowing to knife-edge sharpness. He stood motionless in the water, watching the shape, seemingly overcome. But Atem doubted it was fear, from the way his shoulders tightened, like a lioness coiling her muscles before a leap, his face transformed by vicious relish. If anyone knew the presence of death, it was Kaiba. 

“Is that so,” he said, a low growl shivering with anticipation. He glanced at Atem. Oh yes, there was fear; what little dust of it remained. Almost nothing compared to the bloodlust. “You’re swimming out there?” 

“Yes.”

"Then let's go meet your god."

He rapidly tore off his bracers and his buckles, pulled off his shirt, and bundled it all together, flinging the wet fabric in a heap onto the sand. With a neat hop, he threw his arms forward, curving into the water like an arrow. He surfaced a short distance away and started to swim, a strong freestyle. With a twinge of foreboding, Atem followed. 

They swam out, the seafloor dropping along a shallow incline with every stroke, the water darkening with depth. Below them, the sand was dotted with rocks and corals in a kaleidoscopic flourishing of shapes – twisted fans, spindly fingers, spiny, mushroom-like growths. A landscape of indulgent, vibrant fractals. Fleets of fish hovered and darted through the rocky towers and coral overhangs. Even though the increasingly deep sea muted their colors, Atem sensed them, dream-like, richer and more drenched with light than any gemstone he’d ever worn.

But as much as he wanted to stop and dive down, he couldn’t. He and Kaiba swam to the point where the seafloor fell at a sharp angle and became a reef wall, sliding down, down, down into a void, and continued a dozen meters beyond that. The water was deep, nothing below their feet but a soft blue emptiness. 

They treaded water, facing each other several lengths apart. Kaiba was calm but on guard, eyeing the creature swimming in large, lazy circles around them. Every time it passed behind him, he swung his head over one shoulder, then the other, keeping it almost constantly within sight.

“You know what it is, right?” Atem said, coaxing. Kaiba had the answer buried somewhere, deep in his ancestral memory, from his own first life. He was sure of it. 

Kaiba gave Atem a wary look, visibly casting about for the answer.

And, true to form, he seized it: “A medjed.” 

The fish of Osiris: a gigantic freshwater elephantfish, far from home, its long, snout-like nose wafting as it swam. It was some six or seven meters long, several dozen times larger than its cousins in the Nile.

That was not the only thing strange about it. As it curved around Atem, his heart pounding, he realized it was not just a fish. It was hundreds of fish, all dead, dismembered and decaying, their spiny bones poking through rotting, flaking white flesh. The body of Osiris’ fish was cobbled together from the sunken corpses of its oceanic kin, dredged up from the blackest chasms. The more he looked, the more Atem saw: countless fish in countless colors, the muscular body of a shark, missing its fins, the shocked, wide-eyed head of a lime-green moray eel. Turtles suffocated by plastic, embedded in bubbled yellow-white clouds of blubber, dolphins strangled in fishing nets, more slippery, pungent innards than a fish market. Threads of seaweed and tentacle-arms looped through the quilt of bodies like bizarre embroidery.

And all over there were worms, furred and flaming; worms crawling, wriggling, feeding, feasting. It filled Atem not with nausea, or horror, but a visceral awe. A sense that if he burrowed past the bodies, into the heart of this creature of creatures, he'd catch a glimpse of a cosmic truth, a sublime annihilation of everything he thought he understood. Even in this titanic legion of death, there was life, restless and thriving.

The elephantfish fixed Atem with a look from its wide, lidless squid eye – a look that plunged into him like a spear, straight through the chest. 

« MY LITTLE HAWK » it said, with the voice of the Lord of Death. « I CANNOT LEAVE THE FIELD OF REEDS. I SPEAK THROUGH MY MESSENGER, SEWN TOGETHER BY SHE THE BRILLIANT ONE. »

« I hear you, Father » Atem said. Reef scavengers were gathering, attracted by the ripe carcasses. Instinctively he jerked away as a small shark, coming up from the reef, swept in stately grace past his feet, nudging at a dead fish with its broad nose. 

« YOUR ACTIONS DEFY MA’AT-AS-ORDER. NO ONE LEAVES ME ONCE I HAVE WELCOMED THEM. »

Atem, swallowing, found most of his nerve intact.

« My death defied Ma’at-as-Righteousness » he said. « What reason was there for it? Tell me! »

« YOU DEMAND A REASON, WHEN SO MANY ARE GIVEN NONE? ARROGANCE. »

Atem released a breath, sinking slightly lower, but doing his best to keep his head above water. The effort was starting to exhaust him, muscles burning, but he forced himself to push past it. He'd never argued with a god before. He'd simply upheld their divine order, without question. Kaiba was watching him now, instead of the elephantfish; Kaiba who’d never taken a single hit lying down, and staggered back to his feet after every one. _Fight!_ his eyes commanded.

A stray whitecap smacked Atem in the mouth and he blew it out, smiling. He knew the monumental order his gods had built. He knew what hammer to hit it with.

« If I return to Aaru, I will not find Ma’at-as-Harmony. I reject it. My heart will carry so much isfet that every drop of the River will dry out and every stalk of wheat will blight. And for every pure heart, the trees of Aaru will bear no fruit but despair » he said. « Let Ma'at-Herself weigh my heart! See if I lie! »

The elephantfish took its time, completing several lazy circuits around him and Kaiba. Several dead herrings flaked away, flipping and turning like leaves in its wake. Atem bobbed in the water, finding it harder and harder to stay afloat, his legs and feet aching for solid ground.

« VERY WELL. YOU MAY REMAIN IN THIS LAND YOU LOVE, LITTLE HAWK » Osiris said. « BUT YOU WILL NOT LIVE YOUR NEW LIFE AS A GOD ON EARTH. MERELY AS A MORTAL. YOUR OLD LIFE HAS ENDED AND YOU WILL NOT RELIVE IT. THAT IS MA’AT-AS-BALANCE ENOUGH. »

Balance enough. Good enough. _More_ than enough. Euphoria blossomed through him, pure light racing through his veins. Atem wanted to lie on his back and float, into the unnumbered days of his new life, completely free. 

But instead he said, « Thank you, O Lord of the West. »

The elephantfish fanned its tattered, patchwork fins in gracious acknowledgement, the squid eye boring into him. 

It turned its attention to Kaiba, whose hands moved without ceasing through the water, keeping him afloat.

« AS FOR YOU » Osiris said. « YOUR ACTIONS DEFY _ME_. DEATH IS MY REALM AND YOU SLINK IN LIKE A COMMON THIEF TO STEAL WHAT YOU FANCY. »

“We’ll call it – ” Kaiba said, and stopped, swallowing, one hand flying briefly to touch his throat. 

« We’ll call it even » he growled, words inflected as much with the divine as they were with savage anger. Atem was unsurprised. Kaiba had also been a pharaoh, once. Although now his accent was merely passable. « Considering all you’ve stolen from _me_. »

The elephantfish continued its languid loops around them.

« I STEAL NOTHING. THERE IS NO LIFE THAT IS NOT MINE TO CLAIM. »

“You insufferable tyrant » Kaiba snarled. « All my life you've been watching me like a vulture, just waiting for me to stumble and fail. There's never a day where I don't see your shadow following mine. No night where I don't hear you whispering my name in my sleep. I've had enough! You can't have me! And you can't have _HIM! »_

He flung his hand out, pointing at Atem, his voice rising to a shout. The water around them vibrated, the waves flattening and shivering as a deep, rhythmic sound emanated from the elephantfish. Dead fish fell from its shuddering sides. Osiris was laughing. 

« YOU WILL ACCEPT ME, SOME DAY. »

« Not today » Kaiba said. « Tomorrow’s not looking good for you, either. I'm all booked up. »

« YOU LACK RESPECT » Osiris said. « BUT THAT IS YOUR ROLE, YOUNG JACKAL, MY SON OF MY BROTHER OF STORMS. YOU REMIND US IT MUST BE EARNED. »

« Fuck you! » Kaiba spat. « Don’t patronize me! Leave me out of your bullshit family reunion! »

« I SHOULD THROW YOUR HEART TO AMMUT » Osiris mused, irritated in the way only a god could be. « BUT I SEE YOU’VE... DINED TOGETHER ALREADY. » 

Dread seized Atem. It was no simple curse, but something worse, far less petty and forgiving. He glanced at Kaiba, quick enough to see bafflement flash through his eyes. With a wild expression, Kaiba looked down into the water, as though half-expecting a pair of monstrous jaws to ascend from the deep and claim him right there. Atem swam a few strokes forward, overtaken by an urge to go to him, grab him, save him. Did Kaiba understand it? Did he remember, from thousands of years ago, what kind of fate awaited – ? 

But Kaiba met his gaze, blazing and furious, over the gentle chop of the waves, and he stopped short in the water. Kaiba's last, silent word, a final defiance: no matter what Osiris threatened, he would never show him fear.

More scavengers had arrived to flit around the elephantfish, taking experimental bites, plucking out what flavors they fancied. The same small shark from before thrashed into its flank, tearing out an anonymous strip of blubbery white flesh. With serene ease, the elephantfish continued its circular path, paying them no mind.

« THE FIERCELY BRIGHT ONE HAS LEFT A GIFT FOR YOU ON THE ISLAND, LITTLE HAWK. HAPPY BIRTHDAY. EVEN WITHOUT YOUR HOLY WINGS, YOU MAY YET LEARN TO FLY. »

It finished one, final loop around them and began to descend, with a graceful flick of its tail. Its body was collapsing already, the seaweed-stitches coming loose, dead fish sagging away. 

« I give my thanks to the Mother of Gods. When I return to you, it will be with joy » Atem said. A final question occurred to him as a rotted crab drifted below him. He swung his foot and it whirled away in a buffet of water, in erratic, aimless dance. « If I may ask… When? »

The great squid-eye rolled towards him.

« YOU ARE HERE NOW. ENJOY IT » 

With that, the messenger of Osiris vanished into the watery gloom, breaking apart as it went. 

* * *

From that far offshore, their island revealed its shape: an uneven, dark green trapezoid, one side higher than the other. On the higher side, it crumbled into craggy limestone cliffs; on the low side, a long, curving sandbar lay on the pale blue waters like a golden-white tail. Kaiba studied it for a long minute, eyes narrowed, still treading water; it wasn't until Atem choked out his name, a half-gulped sound, that he seemed to remember they were in the middle of the ocean. He immediately swam over, slipping one hand under Atem's upper arm and taking some of the weight off his efforts.

« Do you h – » Kaiba said, and cleared his throat. “Do you have enough energy for the swim back?”

"Yes," Atem nodded breathlessly.

Without another word, they began the long swim back to shore, over the vivid coral reefs and into the sandy shallows. It didn't take long for Atem to switch to a slower, but steadier, easier breaststroke, with Kaiba close beside him the entire time. More than once, after several strokes took him well ahead, Kaiba turned onto his side, dolphin-like, to wait, his body a long wavering shape under the water, with a look like he had half a mind to challenge Atem to a race. 

But Atem knew better. Kaiba’s concern, like any other emotion he considered soft, or shameful, was subdued, conveyed through little except glances and given room only in silence. No challenge was offered.

At last the water was shallow enough to stand. Their feet touched the sands, kicking up delicate clouds, and they sloshed out of the shallows, both panting heavily. With both hands, Atem wrung out his hair, tilting sideways over the water; Kaiba briskly whipped his head. The long swim had left them both somewhat stunned.

Despite his bone-deep exhaustion, Atem couldn’t stop smiling. As soon as he reached the dry sands, he dropped to his knees, gratitude flooding through his body with the heat and brilliance of molten gold. Land. Breath. _Life!_ There was not a single dead thing on the sand. He shuddered with laughter, staccato and uneven in his chest, as if discovering a brand-new rhythm better suited for this brand-new life. No wonder Kaiba was so reckless, sometimes: to pick a fight with the Lord of Death and come dancing off the edge was pure exhilaration.

With shaking hands, he scraped together a small pyramid of sand, building it up, flattening the sides. _Paf, paf, paf._

Kaiba stood over him, still panting, water rolling down his face. “Sand castle?”

Atem looked up at him, grinning.

“No, it’s a benben. The primordial mound. Move, you’re dripping all over it,” he said, swinging a hand out to push him aside. Kaiba took a stumbling half-step away.

“I’ve had it up to here with the fucking fairy tales,” he said, slicing a hand across his neck.

The sides of the pyramid turned out nice and smooth, meeting at a little rounded top. Atem got to his feet, clapping sand off his hands with cheerful satisfaction. His grin felt irrepressible, splitting his face, like all the light was swelling within him, ready to burst out.

“I take it you didn’t think much of the medjed?” he said.

“Nothing but a poorly-designed Lovecraftian knock-off,” Kaiba declared dryly, gazing out at the dark blue waters. “Mokuba’s horror mangas give me a better scare than that.”

Something in his gaze shifted, a color more restless than the sea. What Osiris said to him… he’d brought it out of the water. Now? Atem thought. But the sun was shining, they were alive, and they had nowhere to go. No. Later. They could talk about it later.

“You incredible bastard,” he said. “I’d tell you to show some respect, but I like you better when you're mouthy.”

“Oh?” Kaiba said, with a sly smile, raising an eyebrow. “What, you think I'm funny? Am I just your… royal fool now? Here to amuse you with some song and dance?”

“I’m not royal anymore,” Atem said. “But _you_ , building your little rocket ship, crossing dimensions, flouting the power of gods, just to come find _me_ – ”

Kaiba grabbed his wrist, reeling him in, pulling Atem several half-stumbling steps across the sand. They were suddenly very close, every drop of water sliding down his bare skin glinting in the hard sunlight, his eyes widening as he stared down at Atem.

“ _Don’t_ ,” he said, bringing his other hand up to the side of Atem’s face, and Atem sucked in a breath. The thrill of it was almost overwhelming. Only inches between them, with Kaiba’s thumb sweeping across his cheek, and Kaiba holding his gaze like the sky held the sun: aloft, in sprawling reverence. “You don’t know the half of it. But if _anything_ I did makes me a fool – ”

He cupped Atem’s face with both hands and kissed him, pressing their lips together with as much fire and purpose as Atem had ever seen him give anything. More. 

“ – then so be it,” he said, both of them breathless, and unable, despite the silken majesty of their small island, to look at anything but each other. The first kiss of Atem’s life. There would probably never be a better one.

But he decided to try for another anyway, flinging his arms around Kaiba's neck. In perfect choreography, Kaiba snaked his arms around Atem’s waist and lifted him clear off the sand; Atem wrapped his legs around him. Whatever they lacked in experience they raced past with passion, mouths locking together, Kaiba swaying, back arching, as Atem threaded a hand into his hair and bore down. A kiss thick with the cool taste of saltwater, and no less ablaze for it. A kiss like they were the first young gods who'd ever stumbled out of the ancient waters, and like they'd set themselves to re-making every reason that made the world worth living in: joy, triumph, celebration, love. All of it, reborn. Atem felt weightless, luminous, entirely swept up in

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“Atem?! Atem!” Kaiba said, through a shallow darkness, from somewhere very close by. 

Atem blinked his eyes open, his toes dragging in the sand, his sagging body held upright in Kaiba’s arms. The darkness shrank away from the edges of his vision.

“Wh…?” he said, testing the ground blindly with the ball of his foot, pressing one limp hand against Kaiba's chest.

“You _fainted_ on me, _mid-kiss,”_ Kaiba said, who appeared to be feeling seven different things at once, cradling Atem's reeling head with one broad hand. He seemed unwilling to let him go. Understatement. “Swimming that far out, right after I revived you – too much exertion. I shouldn’t have – ”

He broke off, rather than let the squeezed note of hysteria in his voice burst open, and exhaled. He waited until Atem had his feet firmly on the sand before releasing him.

“You need to rest, and I need to look for water,” he said decisively. “Go wait under the tree for me.”

“I refuse. If something happens, it’s better if we’re together,” Atem said. “If you’re worried about me, how is leaving me on the beach going to help?"

Kaiba pulled a sour face.

"And Isis' gift," Atem said. "Are you going to look for that? Do you even know what you're looking for?"

Kaiba threw his hands up. “Fine!" 

He took a moment to gather his shirt, buckles, and bracers off the sand, along with Atem’s gold accessories, and dumped them all beside the white coat under the tree. It refused to lie flat, somehow still holding some of its shape, the tips firmly swooping up.

He came back, studying Atem, scrunching his nose with supreme disdain at whatever thought was running through his head… and knelt on one leg on the sand, flapping his hands behind his hips. 

“You’re not serious,” Atem said, holding back a laugh.

“This isn’t my sense of humor and you know it,” Kaiba said rapidly, color flaring across his cheeks. “You need to _rest!”_

How could he refuse? Atem hopped onto his back, with slightly more glee than necessary, clasping his hands around Kaiba’s front. Kaiba staggered to his feet, looping his arms under Atem’s thighs and hoisting him up. 

"Royal chariot. Royal warhorse?" Atem said, as Kaiba started down the shore, towards the rockier, cliff side of the island, at an energetic pace. 

"Royal pain in the ass. Shut _up_ ," Kaiba said stubbornly, the corner of his mouth twitching up. 

Atem contented himself with watching the trees as they walked the shore, a languid unrolling of a green tapestry, textured with deep pockets of shadows and golden shafts of light. The silence was interrupted only by the sound of the sea, rolling in and fanning open around Kaiba's ankles, where he'd chosen to walk on the wetter, more compact sand. Kaiba moved forward below him, sure-footed and inexhaustible. The sun kissed their shoulders. 

Even though the future was uncertain – no dimension ship, no magic, no clear way back to Domino – the present filled Atem with a transcendent calm, far sweeter than any he'd tasted in the paradise of Aaru. 

"Kaiba," he murmured. 

"Yes?"

A name _and_ an epithet, he realized. A trophy. The crown of the old king. If he had to give him a new one… Atem thought of coats, airplanes, a pair of unfurling silver-white wings, birthing storms with every beat. O Soaring One. Anzu, the Joiner of Hands. Jounouchi… Lord of Fire, He who Laughs in Battle. Yuugi, O Gracious One, the Lord of Games. He with a Joyous Heart.

"Seto," he said, lifting a hand to brush a streak of drying sand off his cheek.

"Mm."

"Thank you."

A beat, filled only with the hush of the waves, and Seto's footsteps crunching on the sand.

"Don't thank me yet," Seto muttered ruefully. Of course. How foolish of Atem to believe his death was the final battleground in Seto's eternal war. More likely it was only the latest. And the next?

"Okay," he said. 

They skirted a thick log of driftwood in the sand, lying half in the waves. The tide was coming in, the water a surging of swift and supple light. The waves rushed in, flattened, fell back, and returned, every one always reaching a little farther.

"How about now?" he said, and Seto laughed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> rather than cite my bibliography, here's the short of it. ma'at, for the ancient egyptians, was a concept that encompassed quite a few things: order, truth, justice, balance, harmony, righteousness, morality, and so on. As a force that unified the universe on multiple levels, it was the most important concept in ancient egyptian philosophy. it was the duty of every ancient egyptian to live their lives in peace and solidarity with their fellows, in adherence to ma'at, and the duty of the pharaoh to promote and preserve ma'at, in the name of the gods. ma'at was opposed by isfet, or chaos/violence/disruption. ma'at is also the name of the goddess who personifies all of this; she's the one who weighs your heart against her feather of truth, to see if you truly lived a righteous life in accordance with the principles of ma'at.
> 
> in shorter short: if osiris makes atem go back to the afterlife, atem will cause problems on purpose. 
> 
> chapter 2: atem and kaiba find a birthday gift and scope out their little island.
> 
> kudos and comments are deeply appreciated! (as a note, I try to reply to most comments, usually a few days before I post a new chapter.) 
> 
> Thanks for reading!!


	2. Good and Pure

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A massive thank you for the kudos, reviews, and fanart (!!) I did, in fact, spend all of that Sunday in a wetsuit. Bottom temp was about 56F. I saw an octopus and a shark.
> 
> No content warnings for this chapter, unless thinking about death gives you anxiety.
> 
> Enjoy the update!

Two things had always been true.

Correction: they had not yet been disproven.

In any case. Two things.

First, THERE IS ALWAYS A GAME, and 

second, THE GAME IS ALWAYS THE SAME. 

Same rules as always, be swift, be sharp, be resourceful; and the same stakes, thumping with thudding insistence in Seto's neck. _Win_ – _live. Lose_ – _die_.

Although, Seto thought, walking up the beach with Atem half-asleep on his back, the thick burn of exhaustion rising slowly in his muscles, there was a difference. You could not play a wargame without an enemy, and they were, as far as he could tell, the only people on the island. Unlike the games of the past, there was no one here to outsmart, outmaneuver, or _burst stream of destruction_ down to zero – no Gozaburo, Pegasus, or Big Five. 

So they were playing against… time? No. The only meaningful unit of time was _now._ Not the island, not if they were smart and judicious with what resources they found. The ocean was a neutral zone, untrustworthy but necessary. Life had started in her dark, deft hands, several thousand feet below the surface, under tremendous pressure and in blistering black heat; she was just as capable of ending it. But most of their food (OBJECTIVE 3, after OBJECTIVE 1: FRESH WATER and OBJECTIVE 2: SHELTER) would come from there. 

Something bleached pink, half-embedded in the sand, caught his eye. A plastic bottle cap, the kind that announced reward points in illegible black text on the inside. They were in their own dimension, but who knew how much time had passed in Aaru? Had they been gone days or decades? The presence of garbage that took hundreds of years to degrade told Seto nothing. More neutral information. 

The gods were beatable. After a few seconds, with water swirling around his ankles, every step leaving an imprint on the sand, Seto amended this analysis. They were, at the very least, deeply human in their pettiness and willingness to argue. What kind of god _argued?_ Some fucking god!

Osiris circled his mind, a body of dead bodies, every lazy flick of his tail wafting Seto’s thoughts apart like smoke. Jagged animal teeth, glistening. A burning lake. A feeling like a closed office door, his hand on the knob, unwilling or unable to open it and go through. An exorcistic little shiver ran through him, a frisson of unease that threatened to become a spine-clenching vertigo... but he kicked it out, with force. Enough of that. God is dead, and we have told him to fuck off.

Atem's arms were loose around his neck. Was it worth it? Yes. Yes. Atem had staggered out of the water, beaming like a lick of flame set loose from the sun, and his first act of freedom was to build a benben. An act of creation. Yes. His second was laughter. Yes. His third was a kiss… _yes_. Show me, Seto thought.

“Stay awake,” he ordered, remembering all the medical supplies he didn’t have. They had clothing for bandages, except his coat; too much stiff, rubberized material, and the thought of tearing it up for any reason made him resentful, admittedly childish... medicine? He glanced at the jungle, suddenly twice as impenetrable. He’d always preferred physics over chemistry over biology. So had Gozaburo. There was almost nothing in his extensive education about botany, much less basic fucking plant identification. Shit. 

The sand crunched underfoot. A vague memory flitted through him, of stealing out into the grounds at home with Mokuba, their bodies hidden by the long descent of summer dusk. Slicing through the end of a honeysuckle with the edge of their thumbnails and unlacing the filaments, slowly, so that they emerged with a single, fat drop of sweet nectar. So he had that, at least. Mokuba would love it here. When he saw Mokuba again...

Correction. _If._ Since that was what he’d promised Mokuba, and himself, to make things easier: absolutely nothing. 

No response from Atem. With a firm hitching and a tight grunt of effort, he re-shouldered Atem’s sagging weight, forcefully enough that Atem gasped, jolting out of his daze.

“Atem! Don’t faint on me again!”

“But you take my breath away,” Atem said, half-laughing, his arms tightening around Seto’s neck. A far more pleasant shiver rolled up through him, unfurling itself in a warm blush across his face, and he smiled.

But he didn’t laugh. His thoughts were racing, one riverbed holding several rivers at once. 

It was the same game as always. ROUND #LOSTCOUNT. PLAY AGAIN? YES, I WANT TO / YES, I HAVE TO. He felt a rueful excitement. Having seen him jump through the fabric of space-time, the universe reached for another ridiculous hoop. Another of life’s little tests? Fine. There was no drug in the world that hit like the breathtaking adrenaline high of acing them.

It also rankled. The same irritation as always zipped through him, as inextricable from body and action as nerve impulses, restless and electric. If they didn’t play by the rules, they’d lose. To win is to lose as to live is to _ad nauseam_. OBJECTIVE 0: THE WILL TO LIVE. And no enemy here but themselves. 

The highs were rarer and rarer; the lows between them longer and longer. Were there really no other games to play? 

Show me, he thought. Now what?

* * *

To Atem’s delight, Seto’s hair dried into lazy, salt-dusted swoops, not unlike Mokuba’s, thickened with humidity. One black pant leg had dropped to his ankle. The other was still holding firm, rolled up to his knee. Atem had never seen him sloppy like this before.

But it was only skin-deep. When he combed his fingers up through Seto’s hair, half unspoken reassurance – _still here, not fainted, not gone_ – and half hesitant indulgence – _do you like this? Is this the door we’ve opened?_ – Seto’s only response was a soft inhale, as though breathing in the feeling of Atem’s hand, eyes closing in a slow blink. And then he exhaled and they opened again, sweeping through the jungle, racing across the shore, and flying out over the crystal-blue lagoon. There was nothing sloppy about that gaze, relentless in its assessment, as though the whole world were a puzzle and he were taking the fit and measure of every piece before he broke it apart.

The jungle was quiet. The rocky cliffs were only a few dozen meters away, rising from a slope that emerged from the jungle like the thick, muscular spine of an enormous beast. The cliffs were a wall of yellow-grey, craggy and scored, with greenery welling up and drooping out of notches in the rocks; like said beast had dragged its claws down the face and made it bleed a frothy green. Atem didn’t know what Seto hoped to find here. Maybe he planned on climbing to the top, to see what else was around, or he was hoping for a nice, sheltered cave. Like a dragon? Ha.

Seto carried onwards, his arms and back shifting as he fixed his hold on Atem for the second time. His body swayed with the weight, a subtle teetering. One foot flew sideways, instead of forward, kicking up sand, and he steadied, pausing for half a second.

And onwards. Again.

Atem frowned. Not as inexhaustible as he thought.

“Stop,” he said. “Put me down.”

Seto dropped him carefully onto the sand.

“What’s wrong?”

With no ready lie to replace the insult of _you also need to rest_ , Atem bit his lip. “Nothing.”

Stupid answer. He felt guilty, even a little angry, as soon as he said it. Where did _nothing_ take him, last time he answered like that? To Aaru.

“You don’t need a break?” he tried.

“From what?"

Another stupid answer. Atem simply sat down on the sand with a flump, crossing his legs. If Seto wanted to keep going, he’d have to haul him over his shoulder. Looming over him, Seto sighed and crossed his arms. As rigid and contained as ever, locked up, a tightly-clenched fist of a body – if it weren't for the slackening lines of his shoulders, the way he slumped, almost invisibly, under his own weight. Atem smiled, marking his secret victory. 

“This divine birthday gift better be something useful,” Seto said. “We can’t do jack shit with frankincense and myrrh.”

“It will be, since it’s from Isis, More Clever than a Million Gods,” Atem said. “And what's wrong with myrrh? It's a useful medicine.”

Seto gave that a moment’s thought and sneered. “Tch! I’ll take it. But I’d rather have a satellite phone. Or a fully-equipped, fifty-foot catamaran.”

He looked out at the ocean, hands on his hips, as though this magnificent imaginary yacht was due to come sailing around the rocky cliffs, right now. He rolled his shoulders back, a sound like marbles clattering deep in the muscle, and massaged the back of his neck. 

“Hell. I'd be satisfied with a double shot of espresso,” he muttered.

“No, you wouldn’t.”

Seto’s lips twitched. “You’re right. I wouldn’t.”

“What if we built a raft?” Atem said, thinking of his royal barge, its sails full of light and wind and music. The weather in Aaru was always ideal for sailing, with cloudless skies and a river current so thick and lazy it ran like honey. Indulgent. Impossibly dull. Stupefying. Perfect for dissolving yourself into the Body of Osiris, like spilled wine into the river. 

Seto pulled a face, thinking. His gaze seemed perpetually drawn to the ocean, as though the blue in his eyes wanted to return to the blue it came from. Atem reached over and amused himself with adjusting Seto’s loose pant leg, rolling it up neatly to match the other, brushing sand off his calves with light sweeps. 

“I’m against it,” Seto said grimly, deaf to Atem’s careful attentions. “A raft, with no sail or motor, out on the open ocean… completely at the mercy of the elements… we have more power here.”

He dug his foot into the sand, dislodging a small rock, and gave it a pointed nudge, sending it rolling and skittering down into the frothy edge of a wave. As if to prove yes, he had power here, and take _that!_

Then, visibly impatient, he held out his hand, pulling Atem onto his feet. He seemed on the verge of dropping to one knee again, had Atem not taken a few steps forward, somewhat ungainly, but determined nonetheless. As much as he liked the way they’d pressed together, only a damp, wrinkled linen between his chest and the broad slab of Seto’s back, the all-too-natural fit of their limbs around each other, and the long lines of Seto’s neck, a column as gracefully curved as any glass vase, just within reach of his mouth… Atem didn’t want to set any more precedent for such… nervous coddling. 

But as Seto fell into step beside him, he felt his concern, like a torch in a darkened hallway, flickering all over him. Atem allowed it. There was a tightrope below his feet – a thin line between _I’m alive, damnit,_ and not wanting him to worry, to panic; never wanting to hear his voice break again like before.

They reached the cliff face, welcomed by the cool sand in its shade. It stretched up, tilting their heads back, a wall that draped down from the clifftop and brushed across the sand like a torn and tattered curtain. It ran straight into the sea. Further out, swells heaved along the sheer part of the face, in a slow rhythm, with an occasional frothy-white kiss of water to rock as stray waves came in askew. Atem looked at Seto, wondering if he’d found what he was looking for.

“We need a signal fire,” Seto said. “Up there.”

He pointed at the top of the cliff, his eyes roving over the rock face, mapping a route of ascent. Of course he wanted to try bouldering it. But making it all the way to the top, after the day they’d had… when was the last time he ate? Or drank? Did he eat anything in Aaru? Atem couldn’t recall. He had a nagging feeling that unless Seto was stopped, he’d just keep going, until his own exhaustion or worse consumed him. 

With a parched sigh, and a mild pang of sympathy for Mokuba, Atem frowned into the jungle, a dense tangle of green. The right way to say _don’t climb_ refused to form itself on his dusty tongue, _don’t push yourself so hard_ , not in a way that wouldn’t make Seto push back. And, gods help him, he _liked_ it when Seto pushed back, loved every defiant, disrespectful, fuck-off inch of him…

“Seto,” he said, grabbing his arm, and Seto started, whipping his head around. “Are those edible? That’s a coconut, right?” 

Atem pointed to the top of a low palm tree, where, tucked under the fronds, there was a fat green cluster of four round, football-sized seeds. Seto opened his mouth... only to shut it, faintly puzzled, irritated by it.

“... _no_ ,” Atem said, gleeful. “Don’t tell me you don’t – ”

“I live in a _city_. A _big_ one,” Seto snapped. “By the time produce gets to a Domino supermarket, it’s not just a peach but a commodity, wrapped in plastic and completely decontextualized from its original environment – ”

“When was the last time _you_ sniffed cantaloupe in the produce aisle – ”

“I don’t _have_ to! I have _staff!_ ” Seto said, tossing his hand as he lunged past Atem to the tree. He pressed both hands against the trunk and gave it an experimental shake… to no effect. He frowned at Atem, gaze skating from head to toe and back, an oddly impersonal calculation.

“Still short," he muttered. “Okay. I’m giving you a boost. Don’t fall on me.”

“Wh – _oop!_ ” 

Seto stooped, wrapping his arms around his calves, and lifted him, an effort so smooth and clean it was almost balletic. Atem flailed once, twice, his spine turned to rubber, a clenching panic in his core muscles – and he was up, swaying but steady in Seto’s firm grip, with a view from almost two meters up and his knees just over Seto’s shoulder.

“I’m going to drop one on your head, you lunatic,” he said, balancing in fits and starts, as he reached up to the cluster of coconuts. There was one at the very bottom of the cluster, enticingly plump, calling his name. His fingertips scrabbled along the smooth green husk, inching up to the far side of the curve – a hold! a laborious twist, plant fibers creaking in protest – with a thick _crack_ of release, it came free. 

“Get all four of them,” Seto said from below, slightly strained. 

Atem tossed the first onto the sand, victorious, with a wobbly shake, and strategized the second, which had drooped into the empty socket left by the first. Against his calves there was a secretive tremble, vibrating out of Seto’s rigid shoulders. As he eased his hands around the second coconut, he looked down at Seto, stone-faced with effort, and grinned.

Seto’s eyes flashed up through a tangle of bangs. “What?”

“You never would’ve done this before,” Atem said, twisting out the coconut, throwing it onto the sand. “Lifted me up to help me pick fruit.”

He meant it lightly. But there was a sudden stillness from below, a withdrawing, in and away. Like the sea creatures on the reef, pulling all that was fragile and beautiful back into their shells at the first threatening of touch. 

What was it? Ah, yes, _before_ , the past, the no-man’s land, the place that refused to make peace. Every duel another volley of gunfire across the abandoned dirt, zinging through the ghosts. Then there was _this_ , any number of them, however many Seto could race through in a three-second silence – _helped me held me touched me kissed me_ – whatever he realized he was now allowed. And _you_. The self-conscious subject.

“So what,” Seto said, after a moment, through gritted teeth. “I’m capable of a lot more than you and your loser friends think I am."

A touch of snarl, impossible to miss. Upsetting. Had they fought while he was dead?

“I know you are,” Atem said, reaching for the third coconut, his whole body stretched as tight as a snare. "I've always known. You just never let yourself do any of it."

He swayed a bit, coconut held aloft over his head, as Seto jerked his foot sideways, scuffing up the sand, adjusting his stance.

“I’ve done things most people don’t even dream of,” Seto said.

“Oh, yes,” Atem said airily. “You fight empires, you fight gods, you fight death. You wipe all the dirt and blood off your face and move on to the next. As much as I like that, all I’m saying is I like _this_ , too.”

Silence. And then a terse _hm!_ from Seto, forced out at half-strength, acknowledging something had been said, admitting he had no answer, and dismissing the subject, all in one efficient, unvoiced syllable.

Finally Atem got his hands on the last coconut, tugging it free from the tree with a loud snap and throwing it onto the sand. It bounced and rolled into the others, four sunny green coconuts, fresh for the eating.

Seto’s voice emerged from a distance. “Ready?”

“Yes.” 

"Loosen up."

He had no idea what Seto was planning until it happened: a light toss and a release. Atem was weightless before he plunged, heart shooting into his throat – Seto caught him in a bridal carry, staggering to stay upright, looking down at him with something lying stripped and bare in his face, wary, wondering – and set him back on the sand.

* * *

It took Seto several moments of studying the coconut, mapping its structure with his broad hands, giving it several light, experimental knocks, before he picked up the trick of it. Four meaty wet _thwacks_ against the edge of a rock, along the meridian of the coconut, and it cracked open, water dripping from the fracture. 

"Drink," he said, thrusting the coconut into Atem's hands. Atem pressed his lips to the crack, sucking down water in full-throated gulps. It was sweet, exquisitely delicate, the flavor he imagined he’d get if he bit into a blooming chrysanthemum. For a moment, he also imagined Yuugi standing here with them, holding his own coconut. He'd love it, all of it: the challenge of opening a coconut, with a reward for his sweet tooth, the late afternoon light, turning the water to golden glass, the white seabird swooping into its cliffside perch with all the dignity of assuming a throne. Maybe, once they got back to Domino...

"Good?" Seto said, cracking his own coconut open.

Atem nodded, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and sucking the sweetness off that too.

"Cheers," he said. They thunked their coconuts together. 

The Sun, Ra-Amun on his barque, was sailing down into the west. All the shadows were growing longer. They sat facing the water, gorging themselves on the coconuts in comfortable silence. Once all the water was gone, they stuck their fingers into the cracks in the husks and pried them apart, revealing the white jelly meat, scraping it out with flat shells Atem plucked off the sand. 

With every bite, more of Atem’s strength returned. Even tired, with a dull, mottled bruise on his chest where Seto had performed compressions, and still reeling from their encounter with Osiris, he was happy. Eating fresh fruit, every mouthful a squelch of sweetness, with his feet half-buried in warm sand and Seto beside him, was more paradise than Paradise. His life was entirely his own, with no mandate to preserve Ma’at or punish evildoers or do anything else save _live_. However he liked, unburdened by destiny. 

He looked over at Seto, who was scraping out the last of his coconut, his gaze flung to a point over the water a thousand miles away. 

He got to his feet and touched Seto’s shoulder. Seto returned from wherever he’d gone.

"Hey. Why don't we sleep there tonight?" Atem nodded his head towards the cliffs. There was a small hollow at the base, like a tilted bowl full of sand, far enough from the water that it was safe from high tides. “Can you make a fire? I’ll go get our things down the beach. Don’t worry. If a shark eats me, just tell Jounouchi. He says it's the third coolest way to die."

Seto rolled his eyes. “That’s inane. Do I want to know the top two?"

"Number two is jumping to catch a bullet meant for your best friend, and dying dramatically in his arms."

“...I’ll allow it. Number one?"

"At the bottom of an orgy, buried alive in p – "

“Bonehead!” Seto said, in a scathing undertone. Atem let out a burst of laughter. 

“Look after this for me," he said. “I don’t want the shark to get it.”

“Get wh…?”

Atem swooped down and kissed him, his lips damp and sun-salted and sweet. Then he pedaled backwards, feeling somewhat ridiculous, but smiling at Seto, who was turning pink. Oh, fantastic… he blushed all the way to his _ears._

* * *

By the time Atem came back, hauling Seto’s magnificent coat and all of his own gold accessories, Seto had managed, with two dry sticks, to set smoking a cluster of dried leaves. It was the size of a fist, tiny sparks like glowing teeth eating along the edges. Atem dumped everything on the sand and scrambled for stray branches, dried coconut husks, anything he could find, and before long, they had a lively fire and a stack of dried wood for the night. Just in time: the Sun was a gleaming sliver of gold, melting into the ocean, and the evening air was dark blue. The fire cast a flickering halo up the cliff face, throwing through Atem’s memory the silhouettes of royal processions in the Valley of the Kings, thousands of years past, the canyons ringing with sistrums and singing. How strange it was not to grow old with his own people, in his own time… but he’d already made that choice, in their name. 

How nice it was to grow old at all. He stretched, releasing a contented sigh, and knelt on the sand next to Seto, who was tending to his fire like it was a small and fussy child. 

“Ht nb(t) nfr(t) w ’b(t) ‘nht nTr im,” he murmured.

Seto, bronzed in firelight, threw him a quizzical look. Within seconds, it sharpened to a scowl.

“Anything I find that’s good and pure, I’m keeping,” he said. “The gods have enough.” 

A reply sprang to Atem's tongue, _now that’s an empty threat_ … He swallowed it. He was here on the sand with Seto because it _wasn't_ an empty threat. Odd to think of himself, or them, and the seething, messy fury of their history, as good or pure, but Seto's definitions of certain things had always been a little off-kilter.

Seto leaned towards the fire and, with a dart of his hand, moved an ill-placed log, simultaneously reckless and self-assured. Sparks burst up and rose into the night. Atem keeled over, onto his back, wriggling with his shoulders until he was nestled comfortably into the sand, the top of his head aligned with Seto’s thigh. Seto gave him a curious look; Atem grinned, feeling as shameless and indolent as a temple cat flopping belly-up for her favorite priest, and the rats feasting unbothered in the granary.

“I can’t tell you how happy I am to be here,” he said, draping his hands over his stomach.

“I don’t need you to tell me," Seto retorted. “I can tell just by looking at you. It’s all over your face."

Atem laughed, the sound bouncing in his chest. Typical.

“Fine! Whatever you want me to say. However you want me to say it.”

The fire danced and snapped, bright and defiant against the vast, slow-moving darkness of the night and the sea.

“... Is death really that bad?” Seto said. 

Despite his level tone, almost professional in his inquiry, it was not hard for Atem to hear what lay at the heart of the question. His own heart ached to hear him, struggling to bury the oldest and most human of anxieties.

“It’s not,” he said. “It’s not bad at all. Every day is a perfect day. But it’s… soporific. You start to fade. Sooner or later Osiris would’ve re-absorbed me, like He does with everyone, and I would've ceased to exist in this form – in _me_ form. It’d started already, before you showed up.”

“What?”

“I felt it happening. Just a little, but I knew,” Atem said, pressing his hand to the sky, tendons flexing across the back as he grabbed a fistful of stars. “Like I was drunk, and falling asleep. Or like I was made of sand and falling through my own hands, back into the desert. Everything you are just starts slipping away... Your feelings, your memories, all the love you have for th – ” 

“ _Stop_ ,” Seto snarled.

Startled, Atem looked up, ready to snap back – _you_ asked _me_ – it vanished. The blood had drained from Seto’s face, a strange light flickering over him as he stared into the fire. A sudden unease turned over in Atem’s chest, as heavy as a stone. 

“It happens to all of us. You know that,” he said, groping along Seto’s forearm until he found his hand, tangling their fingers together. “It's a transformation, not an ending. Trust me, I'm an expert.”

Nope; he'd whiffed. Seto briskly detached his hand, something tight and stricken in his expression. Torn between his thoughts, battling all of them. 

“And yet, you’d rather be alive,” he said.

With an inward sigh, Atem allowed him his retreat. 

“Of course,” he said cheerfully. “There’s a thousand things I want to do.”

“Like?”

What a question! Only Seto could give a word such lethal topspin, challenging him to hit it back with force and direction, and without even trying – just a sardonic bite and his eyebrows a pair of cynical lines. Like wanting a thousand things was not vision, or ambition, but incompetence. A vague embarrassment washed over Atem, rolling out as an awkward half-laugh that faded to a low _ugh_. The first thing that came to mind was modest, maybe even paltry, for a former god-king. For Seto it seemed almost unthinkable.

“You’re going to think it’s dull,” he said.

“Don’t assume you know what I think,” Seto warned, fixing Atem with a dry look.

“Wouldn't dare,” Atem huffed, and bit his lip. “I want... to learn how to ride a bike. And I want Jounouchi to teach me.”

“What does that moron have to teach _you_?”

“ _Jounouchi_ is my _friend_ ,” Atem snapped, “and he saved up for months and bought a bike off some... Internet man. He and Honda spent a long time fixing it up and and making it _nice_ , and now he bikes everywhere. He came over once, with some flowers in the basket for Yuugi’s mother because she’d let him stay a week, and he rode off. And if you saw him – ”

Jounouchi knocking on the kitchen window, in a spring blaze of sunlight in the alleyway. Cradled in his bike basket was another blaze of lush, dripping-wet color, wrapped in squeaking cellophane. He’d presented them to Yuugi’s mother with a grin and a flourish, a teasing _okaasan_ , and so much unstudied charm she blushed. Then he’d gone flying down the street, nimble and swift; even the poorest imagination would’ve seen his wings unfurl. And in his wake he always left an echo of easy laughter: he was in on the joke, _that_ joke, and it was pretty good, actually.

“ – you’d understand. He doesn’t just _ride_ it, he makes it fly. _He_ flies. Puzzles don’t fly.” 

“They do if you throw them,” Seto said.

Atem scoffed. “Where’s the poetry in _that?_ ”

"There's plenty. Physics is the most poetic science. Light is a particle _and_ a wave.”

“Whatever! You get your science experiment, I get my bicycle!”

"So in the end, we both get poetry," Seto said, smiling. "What else?"

This time Atem was ready for him. She’d moved into his thoughts with all the deceiving, supple grace of a river; she flowed around you, carried you, unless you tried to stop her. Then she knocked you over. “I want to love something as much as Anzu loves dancing.”

 _Count me off_ , Anzu said, setting her lunch aside and rising from her seat next to him. With a sweep of her hands, brushing dirt off her skirt, she took a banal stage: the school roof, during a balmy, overcast lunch hour. Then, on the toe of her canvas sneaker, she rose up, kicked her leg out, and spun, skirt rippling, rising, turning, dropping, rising, turning, dropping, her heel teasing the roof each time, seven eight, nine – 

_Ten_ , she said, arms extended, one leg pointed behind her, posed with more exhilarated, glorious victory than the winged goddess across the sea in Hellas. _I’ve been practicing that for months. They’re called fouette turns._

“Duel Monsters,” Seto declared confidently, interrupting his reverie. “Games.”

“Mm…” Atem waved a dismissive hand. “Not that. The thing about Anzu is her skill doesn’t come from talent. It’s passion and discipline. She’s _always_ practicing. I want something like that – something so difficult that I have to work for it, I have to really... sweat and bleed for it, so that mastery feels that much better. Something like _that_.”

He glanced up at Seto, smirking. “So, you see, it really can’t be Duel Monsters.”

Seto scowled. “Go fuck yourself!” 

Atem bit the tip of his tongue, grinning; on a whim he rolled over and pushed himself up, legs curling underneath him. 

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," he said, his voice dropping to a low growl. Seto's gaze slid his direction, as though determined not to turn his head. "I haven't even thought about all the things I want to do with _you_."

He moved in close enough to let this float over Seto's ear, a warm, weightless breath, barely a feather of a phrase. Seto’s chest rose faintly as he inhaled, the skin under his eyes darkening with hidden heat; all of it barely perceptible in the sharply folded dusk of their little cove, half clear black air and half flickering firelight. But Atem took careful note. And if he wet his lips and pressed just a hint of them to the rising slope of Seto's shoulder, tasting the firm, salted skin, and added a hint of teeth, a teasing bite closer to his neck, and Seto's eyes fluttered shut, mouth half-open, like his very soul had shifted in his body, then – ?

The steel suddenly returned to Seto’s gaze.

"Nothing. You arrogant asshole," he growled, putting a hand on Atem’s chest and pistoning his arm, a push hard enough that Atem toppled backwards onto the sand, landing on his elbow with a sandy flump. The rejection stung, just a bit, but he had to admit he’d earned it.

"It is far too late to play coy," he laughed, raking a hand through his hair, loosening all the coarse curls, and Seto, still bristling from the jibe, bared his teeth in a casual warning snarl. “Come on. Your turn. What do _you_ want?”

“Right now? A helicopter and a steak,” Seto said flatly.

Atem uncurled a leg and prodded him in the thigh with the ball of his foot. “No! I activate Bad Answer. It compels my opponent, who’s a good sport and not at all a petulant bastard, to set a good answer on the field.”

“A Sikorsky S-97 Raider and a filet mignon, medium rare, with a sauce bordelaise.”

“I said a _good_ answer, not Blue-Eyes Ultimate Bad Answer.”

“I activate I Don’t Care. It allows me to not care and remains in play for eternity," Seto said.

“Naturally,” Atem drawled, rolling his eyes as he sat up again, kneeling on the cool sand, finer than velvet. “You ‘not cared’ all the way to Aaru.”

Seto flashed him a look, heart-stopping in its knife-like ease, how smoothly it sank through him. Ah. Atem’s laughter curled back into his throat. 

“You want to know what I want?” Seto said.

“Tell me.”

Seto said nothing, smiling a sharp little half-smile. 

Their eyes locked.

Atem opened his mouth to speak...but he held it, his breath hitching in hesitation. He’d seen Seto's face across the playing field so many times, shining with rage and victory. But never like this, so close and so brushed with firelight… almost like a funerary mask, with eyes set in lapis blue... No, he lacked the stiffness of cast metal, and he was very much alive. 

Did he even have a name for what he wanted? Or was he just afraid to say it? To name a thing, to call it into being – that held tremendous power.

How many seconds had passed? Three? Ten? Sixty? Seto was still reeling him in; Atem felt himself almost magnetically pulled forward, unable and unwilling to tear his gaze away. Seto blinked once, twice, and Atem fixed the image. He had a face like a lighthouse, a light seen across a great, sprawling darkness. A warning in his expressions, the way his eyes narrowed, his wave-crashing force of presence – _stay away!_ – and yet full of warmth and yearning. Look _here_. _Look_ at me.

Yes, Atem thought. I am. I do.

Without speaking, Seto leaned in, sliding his hand along Atem’s jaw. His touch was exploratory, tracing the lines of his face in careful study, as though to see how he was built.

At last Atem exhaled over the thick of his palm, a hot sigh. He was smoldering under the skin. 

Seto slid his other hand around the nape of his neck and kissed him, first on the side of the mouth, and then again, correctly. It was almost nothing like the kiss from earlier, fresh out of the water, exultant and delirious. They moved slowly, their lips easing together, Atem yielding as Seto pulled him closer. A nudge of tongue, a pause to breathe, and in again, deeper, a silent reaching through the dark of their bodies for what was hidden and raw. But like the kiss from earlier, it was also something to prove – to Atem? to himself? – a kiss without fury or blood, just to see if he could.

They broke apart, their eyes opening, drinking each other in.

Seto let him go. 

“I just wanted to see you,” he said dryly, like he’d just swung by the game shop for an idle chat. For a single blistering moment Atem was furious – lying, cagey bastard! after all this he still refused to give it up, still needed the upper hand, still denied the presence of anything other than _triumph_ – but his anger dispersed, overwhelmed. Maybe it was better this way. The simplicity of Seto’s desire belied a terrifying force, a will that bowled through men and gods alike. Atem knew he’d only seen a glimpse of its massive dark shadow, lurking below the surface. Knowing he was the reason it came up for air didn’t make him blush so much as it made him bite his lip and burn.

At ease in Atem's silence, almost smug, Seto resettled himself on the sand, unfolding completely and extending his long legs, one ankle posed delicately atop the other. He leaned back, resting on his hands.

"I end my turn,” he said. "Anything else on your list?"

Oh, good. An excuse to breathe again.

“Duel me,” Atem said, after a moment, by way of apology. "You know you’re my favorite person to duel."

Not enough. There was more to it than that. The words in his mouth started to collapse, suddenly hard to shape. But he wanted to say it. 

"You... make me want... to do _better_.”

For a minute Seto didn’t respond, not even a glance in Atem’s direction as he gazed at the fire. The flames whispered over the blackened wood. At the center of the fire, the white-hot heart broke open, soft and throbbing with red-gold veins.

Then he smiled, pleased.

For a few minutes, they simply enjoyed the silence, the humid air blanketing them in sweat and stickiness. In Atem’s mouth lingered the taste of coconut, the ocean, Seto, wood-smoke. 

“Right now, what I’d really like is a cold, frothy beer,” he said.

Seto frowned. The word tumbled out, in a tilted, guttural accent, from the back of his throat: “Heqet?”

“No," Atem said, but endeared by the effort. "I want to try all your modern beers. Heqet isn’t made with bounces.”

“‘Hops.’ You should try making your own. It’s science, and it’s simple,” Seto said, lying flat on his back, hands laced under his head.

“That’s an excellent idea.”

“Obviously,” Seto said, counting stars. "Mine always are."

Atem rolled his eyes, smiling. He was briefly grateful that Seto’s exhaustion had tamed him, for the hour, and that he’d decided stretching out by the fire was also an excellent idea. The world would move just fine on its own, tonight.

* * *

They spread out the coat like a blanket, pinning its curling tails down with rocks, and slept under the stars, tucked in their sandy pocket of rock at the bottom of the cliff. The fire was dying down, popping and hissing in staccato, off beat from the ever-present hushed rolling of the waves. Despite his best efforts, Seto was dozing off first, on his side, his bundled-up shirt serving as a pillow and his head within arm's reach of where Atem sat cross-legged.

Atem looked up, tired but not willing to sleep yet. He hadn't realized how few stars could be seen from Yuugi's skylight, all of them swallowed by the dull orange haze of the Domino skyline, and how much the night sky had changed since he’d looked up centuries ago, during his first life.

The Milky Way stretched over them, a thick, dusted swath of stars winking in the curve of a navy-blue glass bowl. Some of the constellations were different, here and there, and they were definitely farther south than Egypt. Atem gazed at the stars and past them, into the black, and felt himself rising, unfurling into it, with a soul as broad and infinite as the glittering vastness above. 

A star moved across the heavens, drawing a needle-point line.

"Seto, look," he said. "What's that?"

Seto's eyes opened and slid sideways. "Satellite. Or a space station."

The idea of someone in space, passing over them _right now,_ filled Atem with a nervous, delighted thrill. He knew little about it, except for what he'd seen from movies and Yuugi's science fiction novels.

"I want to go to space," he said.

"You can do that," Seto said, eyes closing again. "That might even be my space station."

"You have a space station? What for?!"

"Research," Seto murmured. After a second, he added, "It's quiet up there."

Atem fixed him with a frown, unimpressed. “Quiet? That’s it?”

 _Mmh,_ Seto said.

That was all he had to say. The next time Atem looked at him, after the man-made star had vanished below the horizon, he was asleep.

Atem spent another few minutes gazing up, mapping new constellations, just for himself. The Duel Disk, the Bicycle, the Dancer. Then he stoked what remained of the fire, coaxing out its last few flames, and keeled over onto his side, curled towards Seto like two crescent moons pointed into each other. The calm within him was almost oceanic. Seto looked deeply at rest. Not peaceful, but like his energy had simply slowed to a momentary stop.

He reached out, brushing a dark curl of hair off Seto’s eyes.

"I thought of something else," he said, lower than a whisper. “I want you to get what you want. Just tell me what it is. I’ll go find it for you.”

Silence.

“Take your time. I’m not going anywhere,” Atem said, and drifted off to sleep.

* * *

Seto awoke from silent, unsettling dreams: endless lines of code, his office in a rubbled building, dimension dust turning Mokuba to golden ash as he watched. Judging by the color of the sky, it was about an hour until dawn. All the stars had slid across the sky, rain down a glass window. He didn’t move, still lying on his side. An extraordinary feeling had come over him while he slept, like he was being held down, invisible hands pressing his wrists and neck down into the sand. 

He glanced over, an effort he had to make with his breath bottlenecked at the top of his chest. Atem was a silhouette drawn in dim grey light, less than an arm’s length away from him. Atem was alive, his chest rising and falling visibly as he slept, in slow, full oscillations, as though even asleep he was savoring it. His optimism was astonishing. He talked about what he wanted like making it back to Domino was a foregone conclusion, like there weren’t also a thousand things that could go wrong. Where the hell did it come from? 

With the understanding that came easily at this hour, when all the night’s horrors had crawled back into their holes, daylight’s distracting inanities had yet to emerge, and his mind was completely his own, Seto realized he didn’t want to interfere with Atem’s optimism. He himself had believed in far more implausible things, and a good number of them had come true. He just wanted to know.

His fingers twitched, an aborted fist. They crawled across the red inner lining of his coat to Atem’s small, slender hand, curled loosely by his face. He lifted one finger and pressed it onto the back of Atem’s hand, cautious, experimental, feather-light. 

Nothing happened. No crumbling, no fading, no vanishing. Seto did not suddenly wake up again, alone in his cold bedroom, shuddering with grief and rage, and Atem slept on. If he held very still – and he was, by choice now – he could feel a heartbeat from the back of Atem’s hand, through the thicket of bones and tendons and veins. 

Yes, it told him. We’re both here now.

Am I? he said. 

He pressed his thumb to his own wrist and felt the proof, faint but present, faint but steady. He was here.

Satisfied, he breathed out and closed his eyes.

* * *

Dawn crept through the trees, a soft light without shadows; the island air simply started to brighten. It was so hot and thick with moisture that Atem woke up sweating. Sweating in his hair, sweating behind the ears, sweating behind the knees, every inch of skin slicked and itching with sweat. But he’d slept deeply and well. The only aches in his body were stiffness from lying on the sand all night, all of it easily stretched out. Seto was still asleep. The curl of his body had loosened during the night, hands pulled up close to his face. Atem almost woke him, fingertips skimming his cheek, and thought better of it, withdrawing his hand. He deserved all the rest he could get.

Atem slipped away and went to the water to wash off, undoing his shendyt and loincloth and leaving them dry on the sand. He slid in as silently as possible and submerged, combing his hair with his fingers. In this fragrant hour, with the ocean flattened to mirrored silk, making any noise louder than a whisper seemed vulgar. The water was clear, pleasantly warm, and he came out feeling twice awakened. 

He got dressed, checked on Seto, and left him undisturbed, strolling back to the coconut grove to investigate. None of them were as short as the one they’d plundered yesterday, and the grey, ridged trunks were more slender than he expected. When he wrapped his arms around one, his hands overlapped. He glanced back at Seto’s sleeping form and smiled. Waking him up, with fresh coconuts… breakfast in bed? And a neat coup on Seto’s fretting: _see? you don’t have to worry about me._

Atem found a grip on the trunk and hauled himself up, catching the trunk with his thighs. With a grunt of exertion, he pulled himself up again, hands first, legs following, and again, this time adjusting to grip with his feet and push instead of pull. Before he knew it, he was a good two meters up, latched to the trunk with all his strength and somewhat alarmed, his palms starting to sweat and his arms threatening to tremble. 

The sweat was more of a problem than muscle tone. It weakened his grip, and he didn't fancy skinning and scraping his hands on the bark. They had always been a point of pride, clean and well-shaped. Vain, yes, but he was a duelist, all jokes aside. And he was going to get to the top. That much was decided. 

Some kind of grip on the trunk, to do the work of his hands... They had no rope. A long strap? He knew just where to find one. 

He worked his way down the trunk, careful not to scrape his legs, and went back to Seto, kneeling on the coat beside him. 

“Seto,” he whispered, touching his bare arm. “Seto?”

Seto startled awake, legs jerking, and he lifted his head, rapidly taking in the beach. Once his eyes landed on Atem, and he’d assessed the threat as nothing more than an early morning, he rolled over and sat up, propping himself on his hands. Yesterday's sun had burned and browned him to a warm tone, darker on his shoulders and fading to his waist, completely unlike his usual digital-green cave-dwelling pallor. What would it take to convince him to try a shendyt, Atem wondered.

“Don’t get up,” he said. "I need your belt.”

“My belt?” Seto said, in a husky morning voice. “Why?”

"You'll see," Atem said, hooking his hand over the silver KC belt buckle, fingertips brushing the tight plane of muscle below Seto's navel – Seto shot him a tight look, both suppressed alarm and bright-eyed curiosity. Atem recognized it as the expression that came right before the steel trap of _daring_ , only this time colored with a rapid rosy blush. Ah. There was no doubt where his mind was going. 

“Take it,” Seto said coolly.

With a clink, Atem unbuckled his belt, tugging slowly on the strap by Seto’s hip to pull the loose tongue around. Seto’s waistband slouched to reveal a strip of pale skin underneath. Let the sun kiss everything, Atem thought, smiling, tongue in cheek. He undid the button, then started to tug the zipper, slowly, his gaze tilting up to meet Seto’s… 

Seto had gone very still, hands fisting secretively behind his hips. Watching him. Waiting, with bated breath, for what he would do next.

Lightning-quick, Atem fired a sloppy kiss to the side of his mouth and sprang to his feet, snatching up the belt.

“Back to sleep,” he ordered, biting back a laugh at Seto’s blank-faced bafflement. He combed a hand through Seto’s hair, half caress, half tousle, and trotted back to the coconut tree.

Something in Seto's face, his posture, had made him stop and leave. As much as he loved their petty games of brinkmanship, he didn't think he'd play that kind again. Not unless Seto made the first move. Sex was not something he wanted to _challenge_ Seto into; he didn’t want Seto to even conceive of it as a challenge. Acts of daring and acts of desire were not the same. Seto might not know the difference. But Atem did.

It lingered in his thoughts as he plotted his way up the tree. The dark belt was polished leather on one side, coarse and untreated on the other. Atem knotted the tongue and looped the belt around the trunk, seizing both ends and giving it an experimental tug. The untreated leather gripped the bark nicely. He tossed the belt higher up the trunk, pulling himself up, catching with his feet – a quick, nimble hop – and kept going. Toss, pull, hop, toss, pull, hop, all the way into the rustling, slatted shade of the palm fronds, with nearly a dozen coconuts so close he could embrace them. By the time he got to the top, he was sweating, chest heaving with triumph.

"You!" Seto called from below. Atem chanced a look down. With a scowl, Seto zipped up his pants and re-buttoned them, deliberate, making a show of it. Posturing. “Anyone ever tell you you’re a real son of a bitch?”

“Good morning,” Atem called back, hooking an arm over the stem of a palm frond. “Anyone ever tell you you’re cute when you blush?”

Seto blushed anew, a fresh wave of indignant scarlet.

“I’ll get you back for that,” he snapped. 

“Sure,” Atem said. “I’ll wait.” 

He plucked coconuts off the tree and lobbed them down one-handed, six coconuts, seven, eleven, Seto catching them all and setting them in a neat pile on the sand. He was just about to climb down – not indifferent to Seto several meters below, doing his best not to fret – when a small, dark bird crossed the sky, followed by a flash of recognition. It was not a seabird, but a kestrel, wings dappled brown and black, sacred to Isis. 

The top of the palm tree was crowned with broad fronds, their long, graceful stems forming a vase-like basket. The color of the sky was tilting into a clear and light-filled morning. With the belt clenched safely between his teeth, Atem climbed into the basket of the palm fronds, bracing his feet painfully against the stems through a loose tangle of browned leaves and tendrils. 

From his unsteady perch, his heart trotting nervously in his neck, Atem had a clear view all the way to the north end of the island, where the jungle thinned and the long scythe of the sandbar slid into the sea. The kestrel looped around him and beat its wings once, soaring north until it was a brushstroke on the sky. Atem’s heart soared with it.

It tilted and dove, disappearing into the far end of the jungle. 

« Thank you, O Brilliant One » Atem said. He crawled out of the treetop, starting his careful climb down. 

“What are you smiling about now?” Seto said. 

“Isis just showed me where the birthday gift is.” 

“We don't need her help.”

“Hush! It doesn't have to be hard mode all the time,” Atem said, and Seto gave him a skeptical look.

“Where's the fun in that?” he said darkly, reaching up to help him off the tree.

* * *

They smashed their way through several coconuts, ate, and cleaned up, in mutual and unspoken agreement. Atem had more than once decluttered Yuugi’s floor for him, as a favor, but mostly from mild irritation. It was both a relief and a complete non-surprise to see Seto rolling up each of his buckles, arranging them next to his folded shirt atop a flat rock, and fastidiously aligning his boots with Atem’s lone slipper. Then Atem perched himself on a rock to wait as Seto improvised a coat rack out of a tall, crooked log of driftwood, digging a deep, narrow hole in the sand and pounding it sturdily into place. Carefully he hooked the collar of his coat over a thick jagged splinter at the top, brushing off the sand and leaving it billowing lightly in the breeze.

With their camp well-tended, they walked up the beach, past Atem’s still-standing benben, ignored by the tide. The treeline started to thin. Before long, the bay on the other side of the sandbar was visible through the trees. The kestrel had disappeared somewhere around here, but a quick exploration of the sandbar revealed nothing, only more pale white sands, pale blue waters, and bone-white conch shells, as heavy as concrete.

They plunged into the jungle. It was cooler than the shoreline, with a less harsh light, softened to a green-gold by the tree canopy. The sand gave way to a limp mulch, their bare feet and calves speckling with dirt. Small white flowers hung off vines and trees like wilting stars. Several times Atem held still and felt the jungle breathing around him, like they’d crawled into a pair of leafy, sunlit lungs.

Seto picked his way through the greenery, slinging his long legs over stray rocks and fallen trees, ducking to peer into emerald-black pockets of moisture in the undergrowth. Atem kept a close eye on him. I’m looking, he thought. You got what you wanted. You found me. Was that enough? Was that all you wanted? Atem doubted it. What do you want next? What do you want _now?_

Seto’s fingertips trailed over the petals of a flower, an idle stroke in passing, in curiosity. Was it enough just to touch, to feel, to breathe it in? To pick fruit and eat together? To follow your broad, sun-dappled back through the greenery and see not the faded violence but the strength that carried you through it? That carried me? To wake up and see your face, all the hard edges washed to softness in serene morning light, dreaming of the good and pure?

Atem almost ran straight into him. He’d come to a stop, stock-still on the edge of a small, sunny clearing. 

“Is _that_ your birthday gift?” he said, as Atem sidled past him. Before he even saw it, Atem knew the answer was yes. The light in the clearing had a color to it, the same peaceful, golden light that filled the temples on a festival day, when the gods were present. 

And yet, when he saw it, he gasped, struck by the oddness of the gift.

“That is not an espresso,” he said.

“No. It is not,” Seto agreed.

Caught in the trees, with its nose resting in the earth and its tail aloft, was the rusted, rotted wreckage of a World War Two fighter plane.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *smash cut to LOST title card* 
> 
> 1\. i had no idea what a raw off-the-tree coconut looked like, until i looked up "how to open a coconut without tools" on youtube, and kaiba's city-boy ass doesn't either.
> 
> 2\. Ancient Egyptian mythological/historical notes: hellas is the ancient greek name for ancient greece. the winged victory of samothrace and other marbles aren't contemporary with atem but Anzu IS a goddess of victory. 
> 
> Atem's line translates to "everything good and pure on which a god lives," which is from the offering formula, a common ritual statement inscribed or invoked when leaving offerings at temples and such on behalf of the deceased, so that they could also partake in what was being offered alongside the gods. [More on the offering formula here.](https://www.bibalex.org/learnhieroglyphs/lesson/LessonDetails_En.aspx?l=88)
> 
> And, it was believed that when a pharaoh died, they became Osiris. I have adapted this bit of mythology for my own frivolous and nefarious purposes (morbid and existential tropical island romance).
> 
> Chapter 3: some jungle forensics and round two of the 'what do you want' game, with the volume turned up.
> 
> thank you for reading! I'm always grateful for your kudos and kind comments. hope you're staying safe and healthy in quarantine!


	3. The Overview Effect

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to everyone who commented, kudo'd or bookmarked! very happy to see this odd little passion project is as much fun for you as it is for me :)
> 
> CW for this chapter: death mentions everywhere. copious amounts of anxiety. other than that, nothing.
> 
> Enjoy! Try the uni!!

Gravitational field: DISABLED. 

The gravitational field generator powered down. The thick, crunching sounds of machinery ricocheted distantly through the empty halls and stark white light of the KaibaCorp Space Station.

Their echoes finally faded, into perfect, still-water silence. 

Seto heard nothing louder than his heartbeat in his ears, a slow, pounding thunder. He saw nothing but steely gray panels. The debris shields were still closed, blocking the outer world – outer space – from view. 

Alone, in his private section of the station (the upper stroke of the K), he grabbed the handrail set into the wall as his feet floated up off the walkway, like he’d slid into a pool of water. Intellectually, he knew physics was physics, and its laws were the same in space as they were on Earth. And yet, as his card locket drifted in lazy orbit around his neck, his hair wafting before his eyes, a sense of freedom rippled through him, a deep, dreamlike swooning into a dimension where physics was irrelevant. When he closed his eyes he felt himself unlacing, every nerve and sinew, all of him unfolding out like a Hoberman sphere. Every feeling freed.

He opened his eyes, hope fluttering like a moth between cupped hands, both delicate and eager.

“Lights off on K Deck 8,” he announced. The long, low room plunged into darkness. “Open debris shields on K Deck 8.”

A line of light cut across the darkness, a brilliant, blinding seam, splitting open with slow gravitas. He set his feet against the door itself, knees bent, and jumped...

...flying, straight and true, like an arrow from an archer’s bow, through empty space. With gymnastic grace, he landed in a half crouch on one of the massive beams between windows, grabbing hold of another handrail, one-handed. The other he allowed to drift up behind him, the card locket floating towards it. The movement of the shields opening vibrated through his hand, a humming churn of machinery. Sunlight poured in, ferocious and white, a wave of overwhelming brightness… he turned his head sideways, squinting, holding his breath until all the light passed through him. 

And as his vision resolved, he saw it: 

The great curve of the Earth, a dark, silent sphere gilded with light. 

Dawn was breaking over the Pacific, a golden oil seep across the vast waters, the wisps of clouds baroque in their shifting flashes of white-gold-pink. The planet was glossed in atmosphere, every coastline and island preserved intact below a layer of black glass. Intellectually, he knew: he was not going to see borders or boundaries or languages or any of the other arbitrary distinctions that held people apart. No violence, no anger, none of their stupid, petty hatreds. From this high up, the Earth and all her children could only be seen together and whole, the veins of their lives laced together in one massive, throbbing body, a body at rest, a body at peace. From this high up, he was supposed to see.

And yet...

And 

  
  
  
  


yet.

He didn’t know how long he stayed there, watching his slice of the planet tilt into the morning light. He knew only that it was a long time, and it ended only when his earpiece crackled to life with a voice he half remembered.

“Niisama,” Mokuba said, as always half curiosity, half concern. “How is it up there?”

Seto didn’t reply. The coastline of Japan glittered with dust and Domino was easy to find. He imagined pressing down with his fingertip, flattening it, like a clump of wet sugar on the side of a saucer. Mokuba was down there. A winking point of light.

“Niisama?”

“It’s... quiet,” Seto said, after a moment. 

As he searched for words, any words, something better than that pathetic conclusion, he folded back into himself. Everything loose reeled in and tightened, wound up in perpetual tension. Rage re-embedded itself between the muscles of his chest, grinding like broken glass in sharp, aching reminder. He was alone up here. Even in zero gravity, the weight was insufferable. What a fucking joke. 

“And?” Mokuba prompted.

Seto stared down at the Earth. It stared back, a mirror of perfect indifference. Deep within him, his anger snapped again, hotter, harder, brighter. “And that’s it.” 

* * *

Atem and Seto stood in the clearing, in the bright and gleaming jungle sun, and again started to sweat. The air had all the thick, unpleasant warmth of a dog's tongue, painting sticky stripes across their bare skin. Atem looked at the wreckage of the airplane – a rusting, grey-brown carcass, surrendering in pieces to the eager, reaching tendrils of the vines – and then at Seto, beautiful and alive, sweat running in threads down his collarbones like showing Atem the best and most secret paths down his body.

"What is it?” he said. 

“An American Grumman F6F Hellcat, from the second World War,” Seto said.

Atem frowned. The plane looked far too run-down for flying. But because it was Seto, he had to ask.

“Can you fix it? Can we fly it out of here?”

And because it was Seto, he gave it serious thought, eyes fixed studiously on the Hellcat. The air was vibrating with the long, low, atonal trills of insects, hidden in the cool folds of the jungle.

“No,” he admitted, after a long moment. “See? Someone turned that fuselage into Swiss cheese. It must’ve gone down in a dogfight."

Atem squinted past the vines and the rust. The body of the plane sat squarely on the wings, one of which lightly touched the earth. The top of the airplane had once been dark blue, the bottom grey-white, shark-like. Other than that, he saw nothing much to note.

"I don't see the fuselage," he said. 

“It’s the main body of the plane. You know, the really, really big part.”

“I’m sorry, was I supposed to know this? Is this something everyone learns growing up in the modern world? Was Yuugi cutting airplane class in school?”

They narrowed their eyes at each other, with a very familiar sense of sizing each other up for a fight.

Seto broke the tension with a snort of amusement. “If you don’t know something, just ask me next time. Otherwise, _you_ look like an idiot and _I_ look like an asshole.”

“Oh, you just _look_ like an asshole?” Atem said, grinning. Seto didn't reply, smiling as he loped through the grasses towards the airplane. 

“Look,” he said, lifting his hand and pointing it along the fuselage. “There. From the nose to the other side of the wing.”

Now Atem saw them, as he followed the line of Seto’s hand: several dozen small black holes, punched through the metal in an erratic line along the side of the Hellcat. A froth of moss spilled from the holes, in a way that made his stomach clench with itching, visceral unease. Standing in the weighty shadow of its decay, the bottom of the rusting wreck within arm’s reach, he struggled to imagine the thing airborne. 

But it _had_ flown, maybe even thousands of miles, and come down _here_. He’d seen them fly. And almost instantly he started to understand the thrall this kind of machine had over Seto, why he had chosen to emerge from the still-unsettled smoke of Alcatraz in a sleek shining knife of a jet, laughing over the roar of the engines. 

Seto studied the Hellcat, arms crossed.

“Maybe the radio still works,” Atem ventured. 

“I doubt it,” Seto said, but nonetheless stepped onto the wingtip, testing the strength of the wing sheeting with cautious, ginger bounces. When they didn’t give way under his weight, he crept up to the filthy, dirt-encrusted canopy over the cockpit, partially shattered, no doubt by the same guns that brought down the plane.

What remained was half-open, exposing the military-green interior to the hot, wet air of the island. He leaned over the cockpit, peering inside, thinking… and slung his leg over the edge, slipping swift and nimble into the pilot seat. 

Atem climbed onto the wing after him, panels rattling under each step. Seto had settled into the cockpit, back straight against the weathered, rotted seat, long legs slightly spread, testing various knobs and dials on the degraded flight instrument panel. They moved unhappily under his fingers, protesting with rusted squeaks and clicks. The round meters were all crusted in grime, their glass faces cracked, measuring only the state of ruin.

"Nothing?" Atem said, standing on the wing and leaning over him, one hand on the edge of the windshield for support.

"It's all dead," Seto said, slumping several inches in the seat, tilting his head sideways to lean against his fist and scowling. "No transponder, no homing device, no electronics of any kind… How fitting. A dead, rotting god gave us a dead, rotting airplane."

The gift was from Isis, not Osiris, Atem wanted to say, and she's a god of resurrection, not death. But that would help nothing; Seto's reaction to the delicate china-shop intricacies of his religion was only ever to stomp and snort and see red. He leaned sideways against the weather-battered hump behind the cockpit. 

The ocean was not more than a dozen meters away, hidden behind a wall of trees, judging by the sound of crashing waves rolling through them. Across the clearing was the edge of a large rock formation, teeming with greenery, its body vanishing into the jungle.

He brought his hand to rest atop Seto's head, idly stroking his salt-coarsened hair. He could think of worse birthday gifts than this, solving a confounding little puzzle on a gorgeous little island, with his confounding, gorgeous little thunderstorm leaning unthinkingly into his touch. 

A thought struck him, standing there, and he chuckled.

"What's funny?" Seto murmured.

"Well, we're not the only ones who crash-landed on this island," Atem said. "Maybe we'll get out of here the same way the pilot did."

"So it's a test?" Seto growled, with a humorless smile. "Solve it, and we get to go home?"

His tone made Atem's stomach twist. A savage, spiteful note, all at once eager and furious.

“No. What? I just meant… maybe it’s… something to… give us hope,” Atem offered, limping towards the end of the thought, skewered by the withering skepticism of Seto's gaze. “You didn’t find anyone in here, did you? Maybe the pilot ejected? Or maybe he survived and got rescued.”

“Too many maybes,” Seto scoffed, rolling his head to look up at Atem. His tone turned brisk and methodical as he counted things off, folding in thumb, finger, finger. “This aircraft didn’t have an ejection seat, so that’s out. The canopy’s still here, so he didn’t pop that and bail. And you're right, he’s not... _here_ , so he likely survived the landing…”

He trailed off, brows furrowing to a shrewd expression.

“Not a bad pilot,” Atem mused.

Seto hummed a flat note in reply, his gaze drifting over the large web-like splintering across the windshield. His hand flexed idly in his lap, making a loose fist, opening, closing, opening, as though beckoning his next thought into the trap. 

He folded himself over his thighs, groping under the seat.

“Bingo,” he said, with a low, satisfied chuckle, pulling something out from below the seat: a large, heavy satchel, intact. Across its olive-green front it said U.S.N. BACK PAD KIT, in blocky black letters, faded with age.

“What is it?” Atem said. 

“Your gift. A military survival kit. Happy birthday,” Seto said, his voice oozing with smugness, clearly delighted with the petty coup of being the one who pressed a god’s gift into Atem’s hands. It was heavier than Atem expected, with white straps hanging from the sides, and closed with a pair of zippers. 

“A survival kit?”

“Yeah. Fishing gear, flares, a machete, rope… the works. The military developed those exactly for situations like this,” Seto said, smirking with triumph. “Pilot left it behind.”

Atem lifted it by his head and gave it a light shake: a rattling and shifting of heavy things, muffled by the canvas shell. A smile spread wide across his face, with an easy thrill of excitement.

“I love antiquing,” he said happily, slinging the satchel onto his back, and laughed. “Am _I_ an antique?!”

“ _That’s_ vintage _._ _You’re_ archaeological,” Seto chuffed. “Let’s go back and unpack it. Who knows? Maybe your gods even left you a damn birthday cake.”

He grabbed the edges of the cockpit with both hands, starting to rise from the pilot’s seat – his bare foot scuffed against the sandy mulch, pooled at the bottom of the cockpit. He hesitated, a frown cracking across his face, and sat back down, scraping a small object out of the mulch and lifting it so that it dangled from his fist in the sunlight.

With a brisk puff of air, he blew off the last of the dust: two charcoal-grey dog tags, tarnished with age, swinging on a bead chain. 

His frown deepened, slowly, and settled, his face darkening like an overcast sky. 

Atem leaned over the cockpit edge, peering at the tags. They were stamped with a name, JOHN J. HIDALGO, followed by short strips of words and letters whose meaning eluded him. 

“That’s our pilot?” he said, stealing a glance at Seto, sensing a rising unease, an unnamed threat rippling below the surface of their breezy green tableau.

Seto said nothing, his eyes fixed with stony curiosity on his find, swinging in short, wobbling arcs on their rusted chain, a quivering little pendulum. His hand dropped into his lap. His gaze swung, with a penetrating iciness that defied the thick, damp, blanket heat, from the satchel hanging off Atem’s shoulder, through the grimy windshield, to the wind-shivering wall of trees. On the other side was the sea. As always, drawn to the water, with an almost magnetic inability to resist.

A sigh, eyelids fluttering. Briefly released from its pull.

“Seto,” Atem ventured. “What – ?”

Abruptly Seto lifted his hips, shoving the dog tags into his back pocket – a rough, unceremonious action, indifferent to age or fragility – and hauled himself out of the cockpit.

“We haven't solved this," he said, and dropped with an athletic hop into the grasses below. “Come on! Look around!”

Atem jumped off the wing after him, landing in a light, cat-like crouch, the satchel bouncing on his back. “What are we looking for?”

“Anything!” Seto called back.

"Why? We have what we need!"

Seto was already below the trees, moving with slow, liquid stillness, panther-like as he pushed leaves aside and searched the ground. For a few seconds, Atem watched him, baffled, more than a little frustrated, heaving them out with a low sigh of his own. Letting Seto keep things to himself was easy. Getting him to talk was difficult as hell. And when he wanted to talk, he preferred melodramatics and holograms, all of it bundled up in metaphor. Why use words, when you can hand-craft something monstrous and shimmering out of pure light instead? And name it rage?

Atem couldn’t blame him for that. He’d fallen for the same fantasy more than once, rolled in it, thrived in it. But Seto was stalking along the edges of the glade, sloped and tight-shouldered, sensing, listening, seeking, and his face had a silent wildness to it, both hunting and hunted. Atem knew that look, from the opposite side of a battlefield: Seto, starting to feel outfoxed.

They had no decks here, no game structure to guide them. It wouldn't end once someone hit zero. The thought flipped in his stomach. 

So he began his search along the bottom of the rock formation, picking his way towards the beach. Nothing but plants, rocks, patches of sand, flowers, dozens of flowers, the island dripped with flowers. He chose, from a stunning array of fragrant, velvety-white stars with yellow throats, one that seemed more charming than elegant, and spent several seconds perching it carefully over his ear. Then he picked one more elegant than charming and tucked that over his other ear, for safe-keeping.

The trees thinned. Around a long curve in the rocks was the beach, as calm and glassy as yesterday. The rock face curved and wove along the top of the shore, like a curtain billowing in an open window. Heavy mats of vines plants hung over the top, some several meters up. He followed its sinuous line, in and out of cool, shallow pockets of shade, feeling like a child in a game of hide and seek, idle and pleasant. 

Seto was nowhere in sight. Something was eating him. Guilt fell over Atem’s idle pleasantries like a shadow.

There was a deep pocket in the rock, more a cave then any of the others, well-shaded by its own natural overhang and well-protected from tides by the high slope of the beach. Inside the cave was a gloom, impenetrable to Atem's sun-blinded eyes. In the back of the cave, atop a smooth, shallow rise, there was a smattering of odd white shells. Some lay half-buried in sand.

"ATEM!" came the distant shout.

Atem pivoted on the sand. 

"I'M ON THE BEACH!" he shouted back.

Seto loped out of the jungle. Atem waved him over and turned back to the cave, creeping in out of the sunlight. The gloom resolved.

They were not shells. 

“Atem,” Seto said, coming up behind him. “Have you – ”

Out of a sudden, electric surge of instinct – _DO NOT LET HIM SEE_ – Atem threw his hand out, catching him by the center of the chest, stopping him in his tracks.

Too late. Seto gave Atem an indignant look and brushed his hand away, slipping past him and scraping what was not a shell out of the sand. He turned his hand over, letting it roll into his open palm: a human tooth.

For half a beat, he stared at it, unblinking, and then turned to Atem with an expectant air, demanding explanation. _Don’t look at me,_ Atem wanted to say, _you’re the one who knows. I don’t know anything..._

But he _did_ know. That’s why he wasn’t afraid of it, not in the way Seto was, standing stone-stiff in place, with the air of a man trying and failing to wake up from a dream. Trying. Failing. Trying again. Failing. Again. Atem had died before. Stumbling across this pocket tomb did not rattle him, not even here, on his new birthplace, this sun-soaked island where the sand rolled like raw silk and the waves caressed the shore with the reverence of a lover, teasing, beckoning. 

Maybe the island _was_ a dream, one last boon before he fell and flattened into the body of Osiris like rain into the sea, and Seto was a shadow on the wall, his presence not just unbelievable but unreal. Never in his wildest dreams did he imagine...

Not a dream. Atem’s mouth tasted sour and the sweat itched as it slid down his chest, under the rumpled front of his linens. He was hungry, he was dirty, he was alive, and he was already jealous about his time here. He wouldn’t trade a single second of coconuts, or bark-scraped palms, or crashing into each other at last in the surf, for a return to the full painless splendor of godhood.

What rattled him was – grief rose and swelled around him like a wave, lifting him off his feet –

It was not a terrible place to die. The view from here, in the mouth of the cave, was spectacular: the eastern shore of the island, a long rib curve around a wide lagoon. The water was peaceful, undisturbed, and bluer than the flame at the tip of a freshly-struck match. The wreck of the Hellcat was hidden behind the trees and the low cliffs.

Atem caught the thought again with a firm grip. He had died before. 

At least, he thought, at least he’d never died alone...

But even though the pilot was no more than fragments of bone, strewn about the back of the cave by the careless hands of decay, he had been found, like Atem, and he had a name. 

“I _don’t_ – ” Seto said, a terse burst of agitation, and swallowed it, his hand clenching into a fist around the tooth.

Atem exhaled, pulling images and feelings together in his mind, from the island, the pilot, himself. He rested his hand on Seto’s back, a gesture Seto responded to with an unsteady flinch, born between the clash of his instinct to shy away and the resolve not to. 

“Whatever took his plane down took him down too,” Atem said. “He... knew he was dying. That’s why he left the kit – he didn’t need it. And he didn’t want to die in there, with the – the smell of metal and fuel everywhere, in that cramped little cockpit. But he knew that if he left the plane, he’d be hard to find. So he left his tags, too. That way, whoever found the wreck would know he was here.”

Seto's only response to this theory was a tight nod.

“Do you remember any spells from Coming Forth by Day?” 

“What’s the point,” Seto said, in a stubborn, petulant growl. “There’s almost nothing left of him.”

Atem wanted to try anyway. He gently pried the tooth out of Seto’s hand and knelt on the sand, returning it to lie with what few bones remained.

“O god of offerings, o Runner who is in his hall, great god… may you let my soul come to me from wherever it may be…”

He recited the rest of the spell in a low murmur. When he finished, he stood and turned to Seto, sliding one hand along the side of his neck until Seto tilted forward, yielding to his unspoken request despite the unhappy, apprehensive clenching in his jaw. Carefully he took the second flower he’d picked and tucked it over Seto’s ear, nestling it just so. Even in the shade of the cave, its snowy petals stood out against Seto’s dark hair, his darker expression.

Then he took Seto by the hand and led him out, back towards the white-hot sands, the waves, the embrace of the sun. The joy that ran sweeter than any perfumed flower. _come! we’re not alone here_

Seto’s hand tightened in his, twisted, and slipped away.

* * *

They trudged back to their little camp, taking the long way around up the shoreline, around the sandbar, and down to the base of the cliffs. Seto again chose to walk through the ankle-deep waves, his black trousers rolled up to his knees and the sun burnishing his bare shoulders. Eyes staring straight ahead, squinting against the force of the light. Atem was getting too used to the distance in his gaze. It was the silence that stung, that slid under his skin and stayed and threatened to fester. No; it had been festering long before he left for Aaru. His third life was starting the same way his second one ended: without saying anything. What a fantastic little irony. The gods had a sense of humor and he was their punchline.

The camp came into view, Seto’s coat still billowing in the breeze from its driftwood coat-rack, a white flag. Yuugi had been silent, on the face of a different water, under the wall of a different cliff. _Atem_ had been silent. He never wanted to be silent again. 

“Are you going to open it or what?” Seto said, once they were in the shade of the cliff.

Atem shrugged the satchel off his shoulders and tossed it on the sand by the remains of last night’s fire.

“Forget that for a second,” he said. “Are you alright?”

“We’re stranded on a tropical island. What do you think?”

A weak deflection. Atem had seen better counter-attacks made from cardstock and sold for pennies on the dollar at the Kame Game Shop.

“Well, I think you’re not alright,” he said cautiously. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Seto snapped. “Come on. Just – ”

Atem stepped in front of him, blocking him from the satchel.

“It’s the pilot, right? Can you please – ”

“Fuck the pilot,” Seto snarled, and Atem startled. “What does it matter to me that he dragged himself off to die?”

“Obviously it matters to you. I can tell. If it upset you – ”

"Sounds like it's upsetting you more than it's upsetting me."

" _I'm_ not upset," Atem said, throwing his hand to his chest. "I'm just asking a simple question about how you feel – "

Seto scoffed, a harsh, disgusted sound, tearing his gaze away from Atem to scowl up the beach. His expression was tight and locked. With an angry huff, Atem threw away all thoughts of careful handling. In a loud, headlong rush, the words burst out of him.

“Listen to me, you stubborn bastard! I don’t want to fuck this up the way I fucked this up with Yuugi!” 

He stood there, fists clenched at his side, as Seto slowly turned a furious, icy look back on him. Embarrassment flared across his face, bright-hot-red, as he steeled himself under Seto’s eyes. Gods! Mistakes were an acid thing to swallow and even worse to cough back up. But he had to. He had to and he wanted to and the time for pride had long since passed.

“What?” Seto said, a precisely-cut question. “What are you talking about? Fucked _what_ up with Yuugi?”

“Oh, don’t get jealous,” Atem retorted. “Yuugi and I shared a _body_. _You_ rejected me until I _died!”_

“You make it sound like _that’s_ what killed you, instead of, you know, ritual murder-suicide at the hands of your so-called friends – ”

“ _That’s not the point_ ,” Atem spat, his own fury suddenly sizzling through his body with unreleased energy. His voice rose to a shout. “Don’t change the subject! All I’m saying is, maybe we should've talked about it, instead of keeping our damn mouths shut! Maybe if I'd told Yuugi how I was feeling, IT NEVER WOULD’VE HAPPENED!"

A long quiet followed. Seto made an odd face, both baffled and stricken. Atem pivoted away, fuming. He laced his hands together in the coarse thicket of his hair, pulling long, deep breaths into the tight, miserable clench of his chest. Little relief came from the humid air. 

Seto tested his next thought, opening his mouth, closing it, plunging into it. "How _were_ you feeling?"

Atem shot him a look, from head to toe and back. Sweating and tired, with his feet crusted in sand and the flower wilting in his hair. Arms crossed, his tone low and flat, trying to hide the bristling anxiety of his question under a veneer of stern, scientific curiosity. He was not quite so resplendent as the moment when he walked into the palace at Aaru, shining with a force of spirit that seemed more eternal than the gods that built the halls. But again he was bashing himself against the bars of his old dimension, trying to break through into a new one.

Atem braced his hands on his hips and held Seto's gaze. "Scared."

"Scared?" 

"Terrified," he corrected, drawing the feeling out from where he'd buried it. If this was a duel, now was not the moment for traps or subtle spells. Sacrifice delicacy and sleight-of-hand. Summon the best and biggest. "I didn't want to duel Yuugi for my life. But we thought we had to. We should've talked about it. Maybe we could've come up with something else – a way around it. Maybe we would've even asked _you_ for help."

"Oh, _sure_ you would have.”

"Why not? You're the only person I know who's ever taken a baseball bat to the higher powers of the world. And you've done it more than once. Smashing up the metaphysical is like a fun little hobby for you."

Seto didn’t even acknowledge the flattery. "Would your pride have let you?"

"Will yours?" 

Seto huffed, his gaze drifting sideways, away from Atem. 

Several seconds passed, a quiet soaked in the wet white noise of the waves. Again Atem reached up, hand to the side of Seto’s face, beckoning his eyes forward to meet his.

Come on, he thought, peering into that arresting blue. Is this what you want?

“I don’t need _help_ ,” Seto insisted, pulling Atem’s hand away, gently enough that Atem read it not as rejection but as reclamation. “I just don’t – the Hellcat is bothering me.”

“What about it?”

“We got here yesterday,” Seto said, “and that airplane carcass has been rotting in the jungle for decades. But that’s what they left for you. That math doesn't add up.”

“I'm listening,” Atem said.

“Did your gods – did they know we were coming? Did they _see_ it? We can live for weeks off the things in that kit. Do they know the beacon’s off? Do they know rescue isn’t coming? Are they _preparing_ us? Did they kill that pilot so we could survive? Did he die for _us?!_ Wh… ”

With a curt, strangled grunt, he cut off the frantic crescendo of his thoughts, gathering himself in a frustration both restrained and livid. An image sprang to Atem’s mind, of a child tugging on a sleeve, imploring answers to impossible questions. Not one line of thought but hundreds, whirling, looping, tangling on each other in one massive bewildering knot. 

"Is this some kind of… limbo space?" Seto said. "How do you know this isn't a test?"

"It's not a test," Atem said patiently. "A test of _what?"_

"Of – of us. Who we are. What we're made of. A test of _strength_ ," Seto insisted, as though it were obvious, although his stumbling answer told Atem it was not. His heart filled with a heavy sympathy. Likely he'd never been given the _what_ or _why_ or _how_ of any test. Only told that he needed to pass, or else.

“Okay. We can figure this out,” Atem started, but it was futile. Seto wasn’t done.

“If they knew this was going to happen, why did they _let_ it happen?! Why rage at us when you leave the Field of Reeds? What’s the point?! Why didn’t they just let you live?! I don’t understand. Why did you have to die at all? Why _any_ of this?!"

It all burst out of him in a fit of barely-controlled fury. But the lightless look in his eyes was one Atem had seen before, on a blimp, on the edge of a tower of a different island, a prelude to his particular style of desperate, tightly-coiled madness. 

And, buried deep in his emphatic snarl, Atem heard the resonating notes of a profound and uncomprehending grief. He was not so vain as to think it had started with him. He was not the first person who’d ever left Seto behind, whose absence had unmoored him. 

Seto threw a hand to his face, hooding his eyes like he had a headache, a bid to hold back his confusion and the shame it brought with it.

“I don’t know,” Atem confessed. “I don’t… have any answers for you.”

“I know that. But you wanted me to tell you, so I _am_ ,” Seto said, dropping his hand, revealing his expression, raw and resentful. 

Atem rested a hand on his arm, in tentative reassurance. Did he like that, too? 

“Listen to me,” he said. “ _Look_ at me. I’m standing with you on this beach, in defiance of both death and physics, because you had the sheer nerve to come and get me. Who cares if we don’t understand? None of this can beat you. It never has, and it never will.”

And for a moment, it seemed like Seto believed him, looking at him sideways, arms folded in a loose knot; like just saying it out loud was enough to send it back into the cave it crawled out of. 

But Seto exhaled, turning to study something in the waters. Whatever had caught his attention the moment they arrived and kept it still, ensnared in its iron grip.

“Atem,” he said. “What did Osiris mean? When he said I’d dined with Ammut before?”

Atem’s blood ran cold, colder than he thought possible in the merciless, relentless heat.

“You know. You already know.”

Seto scowled. “You're the expert.”

“You _know._ You remember,” Atem said, but as a feint it was clumsy. Seto had a sixth sense for hesitation. 

“Atem. _Tell me._ ”

Atem swallowed, a thousand different words clogging up the back of his throat, an uneasy morass of regret. It was a mistake, he wanted to say. We were different people back then. We’re the same people, but better, wiser, stronger. We learned, right? From each other? Can we just skip to the end? To yesterday in the water, when we began all over again?

No. With each passing second, Seto’s scowl had deepened into a narrow, piercing stare, pinning him to the spot. He was suddenly afraid of what Seto would do, what he’d say, what’d he’d think, of _him_ ; and afraid that unearthing this handful of bones might change them all over again. If all he had of Seto was yesterday – could he live with that? He should’ve kissed him more.

“Do you remember the day we met?” Atem said. And what happened? No, wrong. It was not something that just _happened_ , like time or light or thinking. Atem had done it, and he had done it to Seto. “And what… I did to you?”

“At school?” 

“Yes,” Atem said desperately. Seto was too smart to drag it out like this, step by step. 

“Yes. I remember.”

“It’s…” Atem inhaled, his body protesting against the vicious, claustrophobic squeeze around his torso, and exhaled. "That. A form of it. Ammut is the Great Devourer. When someone’s heart is weighed, if they’re found unworthy, Ammut tears them to pieces and eats their heart. But they aren’t destroyed. They’re just…”

He stopped. His tongue was a thick, dead thing in his mouth.

“Go on. Finish. Fucking tell me,” Seto growled, and Atem realized that no more silence meant yes, this too.

“They're just restless," he said, "forever. Their souls wander for eternity. They never go to the Field of Reeds. They'll never be at peace."

He stared at Seto, holding his breath, meeting his eyes because it would be worse to look away, and waiting as Seto, breathing hard, blinked once, twice –

and without a word, swung on his heel and walked away. 

Atem broke free of his blank shock and started after him.

“ _Don’t_ ,” Seto said, without looking at him. Atem stopped short on the sand. “Just...”

He paused, visibly making the effort to summon a single concession. “I’ll be back later.”

And Atem, with his heart crumbling to ashes, let him go.

* * *

Seto stalked up the beach, breathing hard through the hot, erratic static in his head. Two things – two things were always had always been true, still not disproven –

THERE IS ALWAYS A GAME, and THE GAME IS ALWAYS THE SAME. and THE DECK IS STACKED AGAINST YOU AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN and THERE'S NEVER A MOMENT WHERE YOU’RE NOT FIGHTING FOR CONTROL BUT YOU LIKE IT LIKE THAT, DON'T YOU and YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO LOSE BUT THAT MAKES WINNING FEEL SO MUCH BETTER, DOESN'T IT? so why did it feel so rotten? why did he feel like he was vibrating out of his own skin? like any second now what held him together was about to shiver apart, and he was going to disintegrate, slowly, feel himself go and watch it happen...

The sun beat down on his shoulders as he walked, his hair thick with sweat. The day was oppressively hot. With Atem long out of sight, Seto was alone and free to fall apart. He hadn’t felt this way in a long time. It had crept in along the edges, deep inside a tomb in Egypt – really? in a place like _this?_ – and almost caught him before that, several thousand meters over Domino City on a wind-whipped platform at night, with only six cards in his hand and the hand of fate reaching for his throat, and long before that it had taken him by the shoulders and walked him backwards to the ledge. No cards left to play? Play yourself.

A wave rolled forward, kissed his feet, and rolled back. 

Restless, wandering, never at peace. 

_And?_ he wanted to say, with savage, spiteful delight, in case that bastard fucking fish god came out of the depths again. _So what?_ He was like that _before_ Atem’s penalty game and all its relentless terrors. Refusing to make peace had served him well. Instead of peace he made other things, like plans and holograms and dimension cannons, and now he had Kaiba Corp and the Duel Disk and Atem. 

Correction: on the island he had one out of three. 

Still. The penalty game itself had considerably less power over him than it used to. Atem’s unspoken, obvious remorse was unnecessary. Seto had moved past it and he was stronger for it. And he didn’t think he’d ever… feel this way about someone who did not understand cruelty or violence. How to do them. What they did. How to stop. 

But between their crash-landing and the island and the ruins of the aircraft, the pilot and almost losing Atem _again_ yesterday on the shore – his frustration was unbearable, pushing down on him with titanic pressure. Two steps forward, three steps and an ocean back, with an endless, unbroken horizon just to underline how futile, how meaningless it all was. You really are just fate’s little fool, the pilot said, from the shelter of his leafy, distant tomb, thousands of miles away from the life he’d lived, the lives he’d loved. Go ahead and fight, if it makes you feel better. We all lose this game in the end. Just when you think you’ve won – 

Fuck! His skin was crawling with sweat. His head was a beehive of noise. He needed silence.

Seto took off his trousers, freeing his legs from the tight fabric, and folded them on the sand, careful not to lose the dogtags still tucked in his back pocket. After a moment of thought, he also took the flower out of his hair, nestling it safely in one of the folds. 

Clad only in his navy-blue boxer-briefs, he strode into the water and threw himself with sleek abandon into the swells. He swam out several dozen meters, over the rocky clusters of shallow reef that scattered dark and cloud-like across the turquoise-blue sands. The exertion was refreshing, all the roiling energies inside him thrust outwards through each kick and long stroke. 

He swam over a wide patch of sand and stopped, treading water. It was closer to shore than the open water where they’d met Osiris yesterday. As for its depth, shallow enough; if it was deeper than one atmosphere, he'd feel it. Taking one full, final breath, he kicked up and duck-dove, down…

...down, down, down, into the cool, light-filled depths. He dolphin-kicked against the force of his own buoyancy, pulling with his arms, equalizing with clicks in his ears. In a perfect world he had a weight belt. In this world, he could make one, he realized, with his belt and Atem’s gold accessories... His eyes stung as he opened them, seeing nothing but broad, blurred swaths of color: white-gold below him, the sand rippling with light; blue-green around him, the water, and green-white above him, the surface. 

With the lightness of a feather, he touched the seafloor, feet first, kicking up a slow-moving cloud of white, silt-soft sand. He released a small blurt of air, just enough for neutral buoyancy, and let himself sink backwards, a gentle, easy descent that brought him to rest in a shallow cradle of sand. His lungs were already starting to burn. He estimated, based on some experiments during his dive certification, and his own willpower, about three minutes at depth. 

His hair wafted around his face in a dreamy halo. On their own, the slender, pale blurs of his hands drifted upwards, downwards, up again in the current; a musical, coaxing gesture, piano, piano, pianissimo. Some ten meters up, the sky was a dense, restless mass, folding and unfolding in silvery-gold creases of ever-shifting light.

There were no games down here. No noise. Only a cool and resounding silence, a solitary peace completely unlike space, with the terrifying honesty of its emptiness. The world down here had mass and movement. From the corner of his eyes he registered the presence of life, as darting blurs of color in delirious patterns. If he followed the slope of the sand further out, past the drop-off to the continental rise, down to the pitch-black abyssal plane, he’d find more life down there, too – not just enduring but thriving, despite the indifferent, relentless hostility of a place without light or heat.

His thoughts fell away as his energy redirected to holding his breath, the most circumstantial going first – aircraft, beacons, dogtags, bones – followed by more muscular concerns – penalty games, survival, mythologies, fate – and last the things that were, in their primordial formlessness, the hardest to dislodge: fear. fury. grief. love, and its absence. Not until he won. And if he was destined to lose?

His lungs were in a vise, the squeeze around his neck tighter and tighter. Just a bit longer. The water flashed with silver pinpricks of light, a school of tiny, mirror-fragment fish. The fish were Mokuba's favorite part of diving.

Underneath everything, at the heart of it all, in the heart he’d pieced back together in darkness, was a yearning, sublime and embracing in its reach, moving through him and beyond him. He _wanted_ , an action without object, a road without end.

Wanted what? He wanted

An interruption: his chest twisting in painful, frantic alarm. Seto kicked off the sand, gliding upwards, arrow-straight, and seconds later broke the surface with a full-throated gasp. 

His frustration re-surfaced soon after, with its familiar sizzling static. He’d been close – so close – panting for breath, huffing saltwater off his lips, egg-beating in the calm sea. What was he missing? It was at hand, a single breath away. Another dive. A small swell rolled past, lifting and dropping him, his resolve clenching around him like a fist. 

Again. With another deep breath, he steeled himself and dove.

* * *

It was late afternoon when Seto came back, the island on the cusp of another flaming dusk. Atem had given himself a moment to cry, because it felt good, and because Seto probably wouldn't, and would never. But within minutes he felt more childish than soothed. So he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and set to work taking apart the survival kit, with methodical determination, following, as ever, the urge to make himself useful.

He sat on the sand, unzipping and unfolding the satchel book-like along the spine. The contents divided easily into three categories.

First, THE OBVIOUS: A machete, a jack-knife, a long, coiled length of rope, a fishing kit with several hooks and lengths of line, a roll of tape, safety pins, a rain poncho, blue on one side, yellow on the other; a pair of pale green cotton gloves, a round lens that he aimed at a dry leaf until the crystal-white dot sharpened and flamed. 

Second, THE USELESS: Two large tins labeled EMERGENCY DRINKING WATER, empty. Maybe not, if he found a use for them.

Third, MY UNHAPPY JACKAL MIGHT KNOW BUT ASK HIM LATER WHEN HE’S FEELING BETTER, WAIT ACTUALLY HE MIGHT FEEL BETTER IF HE DOES KNOW: A series of small cardboard boxes, labeled in red print with names like STERILE CRYSTALLINE SULFANILAMIDE, H.W.&D. and T.T. SCOPOLAMINE HYDROBROMIDE, containing strange, flat packets. A mirror inside a slatted card, whose slats sprang open and closed when he pressed the top of the card. A cloth bag holding an odd metal tube and six small canisters – possibly the flares Seto mentioned? A round tin labeled SUNBURN OINTMENT, defying Atem’s command of English. 

Almost everything was in surprisingly excellent condition, given their decades in the jungle, and compared to the state of the Hellcat. With a sharp _whsk,_ Atem sliced the machete through a palm frond he dangled in the air. The severed half floated to the sand at his feet. Maybe not so surprising, he thought, casting a glance skywards for the kestrel, as a gift from a goddess who brought dead things back to life… that little theory he folded away to tell Seto later, when he'd come off his edge.

He wandered along the edge of the jungle, rooting around until he found several dry, washed-up lengths of bamboo. The two tallest he notched at the end with the jack-knife, tying the lines securely around the notch.

Next, the bait. He chased a thumb-sized green-brown crab across the sand until he pounced and caught it, scooping it up between two coconut husks.

He opened his little trap. The crab waved its chunky claws at him, bristling with tiny indignation at a creature several thousand times larger. Atem had planned to... smash it, maybe, with the butt of the jack-knife, seeing no other way to give it a quick death, and found that he didn’t want to. This was different from the Mutou kitchen, where the fresh crabs were near-frozen and insensible, and Yuugi and his mother ended their lives with skillful, merciful spikes. This scuttling little thing had a fire in it.

“Okay. My mistake. Get out of here, before Seto sees you and accuses me of being soft,” he said, tipping the crab out onto the sand, letting it skitter away. He waded along the rocks at the base of the cliff until he found several heart-shaped cockles, prying them open with the jack-knife and using their slippery grey flesh to bait the fish hooks. With the poles stuck through the mouths of the water tins, now filled with sand, he waded out again, nestling his makeshift anchor-weights in the sandy seafloor and casting the lines.

The rest of the afternoon Atem spent sitting in the shade with the jack-knife, drinking from a coconut, testing methods of carving bamboo into sharp points. He let himself get swept away in the work, a self-constructing puzzle (how to cut? and where?), and memories from his first life. Long, lazy, shimmering afternoons on his barge on the Nile, spear-hunting in the swamps. A calm broken only by the sounds of a splash and a whoop from Mahaad as Atem hauled a catfish, gasping and wriggling, out of the river. Maybe he was still a good shot. Set beside him, lanky and bored, incessantly declaring his preference for the lethal thrills of lion hunts. Set donning white linens and leopard skin in the temple, hands raised in offering, head lowered in deference. His soul was different now. Transformed. Seto would never. 

Most of what they had in common was being a righteous, kick-hard bastard, Atem thought, smiling for the first time that afternoon.

He was knee-deep in the water, checking his fishing lines, replacing the cockle that some bold fish had plucked away, when he finally saw Seto coming down the beach. Seto was bare-legged, holding something wrapped in his trousers. When he saw Atem, he set them down on the sand, sloshing through the water to where Atem stood waiting between his fishing poles. 

Atem’s anxiety rose to the top of his throat, just under his jaw. Everything he’d prepared to say slipped away, leaving a gap in his thoughts.

“Seto,” he said, as Seto strode towards him, churning the water with long, muscular thighs. He hadn’t lost the flower. “The penalty game – ”

“ – is history, and has been for a long time,” Seto said. "It's part of why I make you want to do better, isn't it? You should know you're doing fantastic."

Atem barely had time to blush before Seto slung an arm around his waist, half-hauling him upwards, and caught him in a kiss, open-mouthed and unstudied in its devil-may-care passion. Atem hastily threw his arms around his neck, back arching in his embrace, his toes and his heart lifting with effortless ease.

“What was that for?” he breathed, as Seto set him down, the water around them flowing golden with the start of sunset.

“I wanted to,” Seto said. “I still want to.”

“By all mea – mmh.”

They unlocked a second time, their foreheads briefly touching together, and then Seto pulled away.

“Any bites on the lines?” he said, nodding at the fishing poles.

“Not yet, but there will be. Where’d you go? What’s, uh, what’s in your pants?” Atem said, grinning, unable to play it straight.

Seto arched an eyebrow.

“Something dangerous if handled incorrectly," he deadpanned, and smirked at Atem's face. “What else did you find in the kit?”

* * *

They built a fire, with the glass lens and what remained of the sun, and knelt on the sand, going through the kit. The canisters were flares, as Atem had guessed. The slatted mirror was a signaling mirror, Seto spelling out SOS, ATEM, and DRAGON with rapid clicks of light. The packets in the cardboard boxes he dismissed as useless – one was a toxic, outdated antibiotic, and the other was for seasickness – but the ointment in the tin was useful, for sunburn. 

Atem followed along, with a virtuoso performance of attention, but really he was studying Seto, who seemed calm but tired, calm but laconic. That was the only sign something had happened that day, and likely the only tell he’d never mastered.

As for Seto’s discovery, he unbundled his trousers and revealed two sea urchins, their electric purple spines wiggling with slow, feeble irritation.

“I used my trousers to grab them off the reef. I’m assuming you tried uni with Yuugi?” he said.

“Once, but Jounouchi said it was bad. Use these next time,” Atem said, tossing him the gloves from the survival kit. 

“Perfect. Hand me the machete.” 

He rolled the sea urchins onto a flat rock and, with two decisive whacks, a splintering of spines, broke them open. Inside each one lay a five-point star of buttery, orange-yellow tongues. They scooped them out with shells, rinsed them delicately in the sea, and chose, as their dining table, a large, low rock, facing the sunset. 

Atem sat cross-legged on the rock, waiting to start eating as Seto cut his trousers into a pair of knee-length shorts using the jack-knife.

“Uni is the foie gras of the sea,” he said, hopping into his new shorts, an action that made Atem, for all his bravado that morning with the belt and the zipper, look away, blushing brighter than the sun. He had not missed the bulge in Seto’s boxer-briefs, nor its unmistakable shape when it pressed against his hip, mid-kiss.

"Is that so," Atem said, turning his attention to the tongues in his coconut-husk bowl, pinching one out with his fingertips. It looked suspiciously like a kind of wet, mushy batarekh, hateful batarekh, punched-in-the-mouth-by-a-fish batarekh. 

“Don’t be a child. It’s delicious. Eat it,” Seto said, sitting on the rock with one leg tucked beneath him and the other leg dangling to the sand. He sucked down a slab of uni, lipping the pad of his thumb.

Faced with this attack on his pride, Atem shoved it firmly into his mouth. It melted over his tongue, silky-sweet and, yes, delicious.

“And? What do you think?”

“What about the falafel of the sea? When are you gonna find that?”

“You _are_ a child,” Seto scoffed, as Atem laughed. “No taste at all.”

“That’s the _first_ thing I’m eating when we get back to Domino,” Atem said, picking up another soft tongue of uni. “And you’re paying.”

“Freeloader. Get a job! We don’t recognize the theocratic state in Domino,” Seto said, setting aside his empty coconut husk, leaning back easily on his elbows.

“Sure. What kind of job should I get?”

“What kind of job do you want?”

Atem frowned at Seto, who was frowning at the sunset.

“Are we playing this again? Are you actually playing this time?”

“Answer the question,” Seto said.

“Fine,” Atem said. Even though he’d never given it serious thought (when?) the answer came readily, as though waiting for him. “I want a job where I can be helpful. Where I can solve things every day, problems or puzzles or what-have-you, but also… do something good for people. Maybe something where I can work with my hands.”

“Mmh. And when you come home from working this helpful, hands-on job all day, what do you want to do at night?”

“I want to cook with Yuugi. He loves cooking. He loves it when his friends love what he makes for them,” Atem said, recalling Yuugi in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up and hair tied back, skillfully rolling out dozens of falafel between his small hands and refusing to let him help. Anzu putting bandaids on Yuugi. Honda, bent over Jounouchi’s gutted Duel Disk, suffering Jounouchi’s barrage of jokes about his latest date and fixing it all the same. Seto on the shore, yesterday cracking coconuts, today cracking sea urchins. It was the kind of life he liked best, held together by the small labors of living, in the hands of someone he loved.

“And on the weekends?” Seto said, still watching the sun as it bathed them in molten gold. Behind them, the dusk was turning a velvety royal blue, peppered with stars.

“I want to go out dancing with everyone,” Atem said, “until dawn. And I want to wake you up as I crawl into bed at six AM, because you didn’t come with us, because of course you didn’t, and then we sleep in until two in the afternoon and we don’t care.”

Seto's face tightened over this vision of the future, a strange, uncertain expression, his shoulders stiff and braced against some tremendous weight. Still calm. Still tired. Still struggling quietly, wordlessly, with his old dimension.

“I want to hold you,” Atem said, without thinking. 

A long pause followed, its time measured not in seconds but by the rhythm of the waves. In, out. In, out. In, out.

Without a word, Seto brought his legs up, keeling over onto his side across the rock. He rested his head on Atem’s thigh, in perfect position for Atem to weave one hand into his hair and drape the other over Seto’s bare arm.

“Everything you want is about someone else,” Seto said, as though baffled by the thought, half-muffled by the pleats of Atem’s shendyt. Atem pulled them back, holding back his heady shudders as Seto’s breath ghosted warm and feather-light over the skin of his thigh.

“Well, yes,” Atem said. “I shared a body with Yuugi for two years. His clothing and his face and his voice. His heart beat for the both of us. I owned almost nothing. I took nothing with me into Aaru. But the friendships I made… those were mine. All mine. They made me who I am.”

“Then why did your duel happen? Why did they _let_ it happen, after all that guff they gave me about throwing away life chips or whatever?"

“I... “ Now Atem sighed, pressing his lips together as a dull ache loosened in his chest, a knot finally coming untied. “Yuugi and I… we thought it was the right way to – to show how much we loved each other. I thought I was helping him by leaving him. He thought he was helping me go home.”

Seto absorbed that with a low huff, saying nothing, the tension in his body unraveling inch by inch under Atem’s hand. Atem ran his fingers in short, aimless strokes through his hair, brushing his bangs back, carding out the tangles, tucking the flower in a second time. He was ready to wait, for a while, swept up in thoughts of Yuugi. How lucky he was to get a chance to try again, to fix it, to solve the puzzle of love itself. 

In the meantime, Seto’s chest rose and fell in tandem with the waves, rose and fell, rose and fell, hushed but ever-moving. At last he spoke.

“I want to tell you things."

“I want to hear them,” Atem said.

“I want to be a better brother,” Seto said. “Mokuba... wants something from me. I can feel it every time he looks at me. But I don't know what it is, and he doesn't know how to ask, or he won’t. _I_ don't know how to ask. I _can't_. So we just exist with each other, wanting but not asking.”

A strange chill came over Atem, draining through his limbs. He squeezed Seto’s arm. “He knows you love him.”

“No, he doesn’t. I want to love him better. The _right_ way. The way he deserves,” Seto insisted, “but… I don't…"

He trailed off, twisting on the rock to lie face-up, with his head still on Atem’s thigh. He looked up, past Atem, to the stars slowly emerging from the veil of twilight.

“There's this phenomenon astronauts feel when they go into space, called the overview effect,” he said, to the sky. ”It's supposed to be this feeling of intense connection, this understanding that we're all together, inseparable from this fragile planet, leading our fragile lives, and everything we’ve ever hated and feared is irrelevant and insignificant… so I went into space, to my space station. And I looked down at the planet. And I didn't feel it. I didn't feel anything.”

His voice cracked. He caught himself instantly with a clenching in his jaw, a subtle swallow in his neck. The chill deepened through Atem, along with an urge to hold him tighter, hold him together, to hold him and never let him go.

“The universe is expanding, you know,” Seto continued. “Every star and galaxy and comet is hurtling away from the center at impossible speeds, and in millions of years, the stars will be so far away that their light will never reach us. The sky will just be dark, and everything will be apart. But I don't want to be any farther away than I already am. I just want to be here, with you, and everyone else.”

He looked at Atem, his eyes full of starlight, and Atem curled over, cradling his face in both hands, kissing every star out from between his lashes, his lips, hot and wet. He finally understood the magnitude of Seto’s eternal war, what wound Osiris had pulled open, pulsing and raw; why peace seemed so impossible. What peace could be made, with such immeasurable distance? 

Atem uncurled, nudging Seto’s head up off his deadened thigh, settling him back down more comfortably in his lap. Seto wiped his face with one hand, that narrow, lightless look gone from his eyes. He was through the worst part of his crisis of faith, Atem hoped. And if he wasn't…

“You know, I once heard someone say – someone very smart, unbelievably handsome, you might know him – he said that everyone has something they believe in, even deeper than gods,” he said, and was rewarded with a small but genuine smile. “You know what I believe in? More than my gods?”

“Falafel,” came the light, low reply, but Atem wasn’t about to let him end this so easily, not with him so relaxed and willing, completely unarmored.

"No. Guess again."

"Your friends?"

"One more try. I'll give you a hint," Atem said, smiling, curling over again, and pressed a kiss to Seto's brow. And below him Seto smiled, brighter than the stars above.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **a sample of research items I Googled for this chapter:** WWII airplanes / Did WWII airplanes have ejection seats / WWII grumman F6F hellcat / What is the name of the thing with all the dials and measurements in an airplane cockpit / [WWII naval survival kit (note: they got most, not all, of the kit)](https://youtu.be/CKUcFhJLm34) / Human bone decomposition tropical environment / How long do human bones last in tropical humidity / Human remains tropical islands / WWII airplanes pacific wrecks / WWII naval dogtags / Ancient egyptian prayer for the dead / Opening of the mouth ceremony / Transliterations opening of the mouth spells / Wpt-r spells / Spells from coming forth by day / [Spell 89](https://zsitchinindex.wordpress.com/ancient-texts/the-papyrus-of-ani-a-new-translation/the-papyrus-of-ani-part-4/#ch89) [from coming forth by day (link to PDF)](https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/shared/docs/saoc37.pdf) / Transliteration spell 89 coming forth by day (Note: completely unsuccessful search, which is why Atem does not recite it in Ancient Egyptian, as in Ch.2) / how to humanely kill a crab (Note: you need ice) / how to humanely kill a sea urchin
> 
> Chapter 4: how to kill time on an island, and more on the existential pleasures and rewards of freediving
> 
> Thank you for reading! always very grateful for kudos or any comments you may have. Hope you're staying safe and healthy!


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